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China’s Millennials

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 China’s Millennials

The Want Generation

Eric Fish

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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Published by Rowman & Littlefield
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Fish, Eric, 1985–

China’s millennials : the want generation / Eric Fish.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-4883-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-4884-7 (electronic) 1.
Generation Y—China. 2. Youth in development—China. I. Title.
HQ799.C5F57 2015
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Printed in the United States of America

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 Preface

On June 4, 2014, along Beijing’s Chang’an Boulevard, there was

little sign that a massacre had unfolded exactly twenty-five years
earlier. Shoppers toted bags from a nearby mall. Elderly women
shuffled by on their morning walks. Suited businessmen filed toward
their offices. All that distinguished the day from any other were the
watchful public security officials stationed every few hundred feet.
At Tiananmen Square, where the protests that had prompted the
massacre occurred, it was the same story. The only commemorations
were those of tourists marking their trip to the capital with pictures
in front of the famous Mao Zedong portrait. Those few trying to
remember the events of 1989 mostly found themselves intercepted
by police before they could even make it to the square. If anyone
tried to post something online, it was scrubbed by censors within
minutes. Thus, most of the remembering was left to foreign media.
Among the hundreds of reports in the run-up to the anniversary,
many sought to compare those youth who had demonstrated in
1989 to those born after the events. In nearly all cases, the
comparison reflected rather poorly on the latter. Some illustrated a
state-induced “amnesia” that had taken hold. One reporter showed
the iconic photo of “Tank Man,” the unidentified protestor who
blocked a column of tanks the day after the massacre, to a hundred
college students in Beijing—to which all but fifteen pleaded
ignorance.[1] Others highlighted how today’s youth have simply been
numbed away from politics. “They seem not to care,” read one piece
in the Associated Press. “They grew up in an atmosphere of
nationalism and pride over two decades of strong economic
growth.”[2]
While accounts like these were undoubtedly true, there were
facets to the story not quite captured, and it reminded me why I had
first wanted to write this book. Shortly after the June 4 anniversary, I
told a Chinese friend in Beijing that I was writing about youth in
modern China. “Be sure to say that we post-90s people (jiulinghou)
aren’t just idiots,” he suggested. “Foreigners always think we’re
brainwashed.”
But foreigners were not the only ones selling them short. Young
Chinese I was speaking to, like many youth around the world, also
seemed to feel older generations at home were pigeonholing them
into unflattering stereotypes. When I said I was writing about typical
young people like them, they became anxious to air their grievances
and struggles, as well as to defend themselves against those who

5
would look down upon them. “You should write about the fu’erdai,”
said another Chinese friend, referring to spoiled children of the
wealthy. “And how losers like me can’t get a job,” he added with a
chuckle.
I came to China in 2007 to teach at a university. Age twenty-two
at the time, I was assigned to work with students just a few years
younger than myself. We were all “millennials”—loosely defined as
the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s (for the purposes of this
book, we will say 1984 to 1996).
I quickly discovered many threads that united the Chinese youth
whom I was meeting and my American peers back home.
Psychologist Jean Twenge called us “Generation Me” in her 2006
book of the same name. Through extensive surveying, she
concluded that American millennials tend to be tolerant, confident,
open-minded, and ambitious, but also cynical, depressed, lonely, and
anxious. She drew her book title from the strong sense of
entitlement and narcissism that she identified among this cohort
relative to earlier generations.[3]
China’s millennials get the same labels, often with survey data to
back them up.[4] Like their counterparts in America and around the
world, they were raised in relative comfort compared to earlier
generations, leading to somewhat lofty expectations. Thanks to the
one-child policy, instituted in 1979 as a way to rein in the enormous
population, China’s generation of “little emperor” only children have
a reputation for being especially spoiled. But like their international
counterparts, they are also growing into the economic and social
uncertainty of a postrecession world and struggling to stay on the
better end of a yawning wealth gap, arousing great anxiety about
the future.
However, the Sino-American similarities start to diverge once
politics is factored in. American millennials came of age as their
country was triumphing in the Cold War. As the Berlin Wall fell in
1989 and the Soviet Union crumbled two years later, these youth
were brought up confident as ever that their political system
represented the so-called End of History. China’s millennials,
however, were born amid the 1989 crackdown at Tiananmen Square
—one of the most transformative events in recent Chinese history.
The seven weeks of protests that year and the bloody suppression
that ended them were tantamount to a reset button for China’s
Communist Party (the CCP) and Chinese society as a whole. Amid an
ideological vacuum that had helped prompt the protests, insecure
leaders had to reinvent their country and justification for ruling over
it. So over the following two decades, everything changed—

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sometimes for the better, sometimes not—and a generation gap
between the Tiananmen and post-Tiananmen youth seemed to
emerge, again with both positive and negative implications. The
economy boomed for China’s millennials, but the bigger political
questions that their parents had raised at Tiananmen were put on
the shelf.
During my three years as a teacher in Nanjing, I indeed saw
depressing signals of political apathy and submissiveness. Jiang
Fangzhou, a Chinese writer born in 1989, recognized this prevailing
attitude as “an active effort to maintain the status quo,” saying that
young Chinese today “dare not stray from the orthodoxy for even
one millimeter when they are still 10 meters away from crossing the
line.”[5]
Chinese youth since the uprising of 1989 have largely been kept
happy by the Community Party’s emphasis on opening up economic
opportunities, but many signs point to a growing dissatisfaction with
purely material goals and to an increasing likelihood that young
Chinese will again become a vocal force for change.
After teaching, I went on to study journalism at Tsinghua
University in Beijing, and later worked at a Chinese investigative
newspaper with young native reporters. During my reporting at
Economic Observer and for outlets like Foreign Policy and The
Atlantic, I continued to see signs of push and pull, as the young
people with whom I was speaking advanced toward or retreated from
a perceived line that separated the acceptable from the taboo. This
period also coincided with youth-led movements around the country
that blindsided even the most adept China watchers.
These observations prompted some big questions. Could the
country’s youth ever spark mass Tiananmen-like demonstrations
again? Could their growing list of struggles ever cause them to
seriously rock the boat? As they come of age, will they steer China
toward serious democratic reform, or will they carry on the Leninist
tradition?
These are the million-dollar questions of contemporary China,
and one would be a fool to give a definitive answer to any of them.
Figuring out the present is hard enough, let alone the future. But the
questions are well worth pondering. China’s millennials, some 250
million in number, stand ready to exert substantial influence on the
world’s most populous country as it is poised to pass the United
States to become the world’s largest economy. How they ultimately
steer that ship will have a profound impact on the rest of the world.
I do not pretend to have a finger on the political pulse of China’s
youth. Nobody has that detailed knowledge, not even the mandarins
in Beijing. But through their personal stories, I hope to give a sense

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of what they are up against—socially, economically, and politically.
While writing this book, I frequently felt torn over whose stories
to tell. I did not include the tattooed equivalents of Hell’s Angels who
cruise around Beijing on expensive Harleys. Nor did I include the
group of disillusioned students who gave up on modern society to
live in a Maoist hippie compound in rural Hebei. These people are
rebellious in their own unique ways, and a testament to the diversity
blooming among China’s millennials. But the people whose stories I
tell in this book are representative of common traits shared by many
others with whom I have spoken. The stories depicted are those of a
variety of young Chinese coming from different regional and
socioeconomic backgrounds who were extremely generous with their
time, spending hours and days (in some cases, over the span of
several years) with me as I tried to probe their backgrounds, beliefs,
and anxieties. Some of them I specifically tracked down, others I met
unexpectedly along the way. I have arranged their stories into four
topical areas: China’s education system, the workforce, various
social issues, and youth who are actively opposing the status quo.
At the request of some interviewees who felt they were crossing
into taboo territory or potentially endangering themselves, I have
used pseudonyms where noted or partial names in some cases.
(Because some Chinese surnames are extremely common, I have
also followed the practice of referring to some interviewees by their
given name—which comes second in Chinese—rather than their
family name.) Every story depicts unique individuals, so we must be
careful not to overgeneralize from a collection of individual stories.
But the collection, as I believe you will see, tells a coherent story. It
speaks of youthful struggle, disillusionment, and rebellion in a
system that is scrambling to keep them in line—and, increasingly,
scrambling to adapt when its youth refuse to conform.
1. Lim, Louisa. The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen
Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, 99.
2. Tang, Didi. “25 Years On, Tiananmen Barely Known to China
Youth.” Associated Press (Beijing), June 2, 2014.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/25-years-tiananmen-barely-known-
china-youth.
3. Twenge, Jean M. Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are
More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever
Before. New York: Free Press, 2006.
4. Guo, Zhang, Ping Yang, and Wang Wei. “Do Not Frown When You
See Post-90s.” Chinese Education and Society 44, nos. 2–3 (2011):
65–69; Tong, Luding, and Marietta College. “The Young and the
Restless: Grappling with the Young Chinese Consumer’s Mindset.”
Global Conference on Business and Finance Proceedings 9, no. 1

8
(2014): 58–59.
5. “” [Jiang Fangzhou: My Tsinghua Experience]. Financial Times,
April 26, 2011. Accessed October 2, 2014.
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001038263?full=y.

9
 I
Getting Educated

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 Chapter 1
Boot Camp
On one of my first mornings in China I awoke to the sound of
hundreds of young voices belting out People’s Liberation Army
marching chants.
I had just arrived at a university in the ancient capital city of
Nanjing, where I would spend the next three years teaching Chinese
college students. As I wandered outside, I was confronted by droves
of youth in matching army fatigues. Throughout the campus, the
young men and women marched in lines, goose-stepped back and
forth, and, in one corner, thrust bayonets into the hearts of invisible
targets. As they paraded about, they glared intently straight ahead,
trying to keep their shouts and their steps perfectly synchronized. At
first glance, the sight seemed to validate everything I was brought
up believing about China: that it is a uniform society, meticulously
ordered by the state and purposefully intimidating to outsiders.
That impression quickly evaporated when I walked within
eyeshot of those glares. As soon as they saw a foreigner, the stone-
faced platoon broke into giggles and obnoxious “Heeeeelllllooooos.”
Even the drill sergeant cracked a smile.
In the years since that humid August morning in 2007, observing
the college freshmen in military training—or Jun​xun, as it is officially
called—has become a mild obsession of mine. The more time I have
spent in China talking to young people, the more I have come to see
Jun​xun as a perfect metaphor for the precarious relationship
between them and their ruling party.
Since 1985, every school year has begun with this training. Upon
their arrival at university, China’s new college freshmen—men and
women alike—undergo weeks of marching, drilling, patriotism
lessons, and berating from People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers.
Any nonconformist fashion statements are banned during the
training, such as long hair and moustaches for guys, or painted
fingernails and colored contact lenses for girls.[1] Participation is
mandatory and a poor performance can provide a blot on students’
records that will stay with them throughout their professional lives.
At least, that is how it is supposed to work.

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Tsinghua University students march behind their PLA drill instructors at the
conclusion of their Jun​xun military training.
(Photo: Eric Fish)
An American blogger in Shanghai echoed the reactions of many
foreigners in China to the training, claiming to be “thoroughly
constipated with disgust for the nationalism being ‘brainwashed’ into
the innocent but ever-so-impressionable youth.”[2] One of my more
outspoken students, a nineteen-year-old English major from Sichuan,
would explain Jun​xun to me more succinctly: “It’s to make us
submissive.”
Looking at history, it is hard not to come to the same conclusion.
Chinese students who came of age in the 1980s appeared much less
submissive. Yang Fenggang, now a Purdue sociologist, was among
the first few groups of students to reenter China’s universities after
their decade-long closure. “People were really moving out of the
Cultural Revolution mentality,” Yang told me, referring to Mao
Zedong’s catastrophic 1966–1976 political movement to reassert
power and rid the country of bourgeois capitalists. “Sometimes a
single article could stir up a national debate among young people. It
was an exciting time.”[3]
But that excitement would come to a bloody end.

In the early 1980s, those few who emerged with college degrees
could count on living comfortable lives. But by the latter part of the
decade, students began graduating into an uneven job market. No
longer required to accept graduates assigned to them by the state,
company leaders gave the best jobs to their family members and

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other personal associates.[4] Meanwhile, the opening markets and
growing economy presented enticing opportunities for the politically
connected to leverage their power for illicit profit. Nepotism and
corruption ran rampant, wealth inequality widened, and inflation
spun out of control. The Communist Party’s legitimacy, rooted almost
entirely in socialist ideology, began to crumble.[5]
Life was still getting better for most Chinese, but many felt left
behind amid the reforms as they saw unprecedented wealth
accumulating around exclusive circles.[6] Those young people who
had missed the chance to capitalize early in the reform period
started taking a keen interest in politics. With the gates now open to
the outside world, ideas of freedom and democracy trickled in from
the West.
Chinese youth wondered why their rulers needed such an
overarching role in their lives and such tight control over their
individual freedoms—deciding what they could say, how they could
love, and who could determine their future. Discussion of social and
political change spilled into the open in a way that China had not
seen in decades.
Student protests calling for reform began as early as the 1970s
and carried on in small pockets throughout the 1980s, but after the
death of a popular reformist leader in April 1989, frustrated youth
were galvanized into sparking a nationwide movement that crept
right up to the Communist Party’s doorstep in Tian​anmen Square.
Those who sparked the protests saw themselves as fervent
patriots. They were carrying on a proud youth tradition stretching
back to the May 4th Movement of 1919, when students lashed out at
their weak government for clinging to an outdated culture and failing
to stand up to encroaching foreign powers. When the Communists
came to power three decades later, they co-opted May 4, making it
the national “Youth Day” holiday. They saluted the 1919 students’
courage and held them up as revolutionary forebears of the
Communist cause against feudalism and imperialism.
Many of the student protesters at Tian​anmen were accomplished
Communist Party members themselves who strongly supported
reformist leaders within the government. They simply saw
themselves as the descendants of May 4th—guardians of the
nation’s dignity and fighters against corrupted bureaucrats. Some
wanted Western-style democracy, while others just wanted
meaningful reform within the existing system. Almost all were united
in their demands for respect and a fair chance to succeed in society.
During the protests, the song “Nothing to My Name” by twenty-
seven-year-old Chinese rock star Cui Jian became the movement’s

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anthem. Depicting a girl who ridicules her admirer for lacking
material wealth, the song captured the disillusionment that many
youth felt. “[It] expresses our feelings,” Tian​anmen student leader
Wu’er Kaixi said years later. “Does our generation have anything?
We don’t have the goals our parents had. We don’t have the
fanatical idealism our older brothers and sisters once had. So what
do we want? Nike shoes. Lots of free time to take our girlfriends to a
bar. The freedom to discuss an issue with someone, and to get a
little respect from society.”[7]
After Tian​anmen had been occupied for seven weeks, hardliners
in the Communist Party gained control and decided they had had
enough. They could have cleared the streets with nondeadly riot
gear. Instead, they sent in the People’s Liberation Army with
machine guns and tanks, in many cases shooting almost anything
that moved. Though the blood that ran down Beijing’s streets was
hastily scrubbed away, it left a long-lasting message for anyone who
might think of stirring up rebellion again. It was a message that
silenced a generation.
The massacre bought the Communist Party time, which it used
to construct a new leadership model that would keep the country’s
hot-headed youngsters in line. Two months after the suppression in
Beijing, students at Peking University—where most of the Tian​anmen
ringleaders had come from—were subjected to a full year of military
training.[8] Other universities were subject to intensive
reindoctrination programs, and within two years, the Communist
Party had overhauled its entire education curriculum for all ages.[9] It
shifted from emphasizing Marxism and class struggle to pushing
Chinese nationalism and how the CCP rescued the country from
humiliation under violent foreign imperialists.
If the bloody crackdown of 1989 and the new education failed to
dissuade any would-be instigators, then China’s surveillance and
intimidation apparatus has done quite well at picking up the slack.
Its efficiency at identifying and silencing dissent has continually
grown more sophisticated.
But the post-1989 strategy that has arguably had the most
sweeping effect in preventing further uprisings is simple economics.
During the 1990s President Jiang Zemin, who ascended to power
amid the fallout from Tian​anmen, launched dramatic market reforms
that loosened the state’s grip on the economy. He began dismantling
thousands of inefficient state-owned enterprises and started
integrating China into the world economy, while at the same time
steadily retreating from the personal lives of China’s citizens. The
tacit bargain was simple: accept one-party rule and you can get rich.

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 As a result of this bargain’s success, the post-Tian​anmen
generation has never known anything but perpetually improving
opportunities. In the two decades following 1989, China saw a
fourteenfold increase in per-capita income and an eightfold increase
in college enrollment.[10] International travel was transformed from a
luxury relegated to the elite into something that 97 million Chinese
enjoyed in 2013.[11] Formerly monochromatic, once dingy cities filled
with young people wearing Western brands of clothing and chatting
on smartphones. They got their Nike shoes and plenty of bars to take
their girlfriends to. Puritanical Big Brother even backed off and gave
them sexual liberation. The material opportunities and personal
freedoms that those at Tian​anmen had demanded were satisfied,
convincing the next generation that the more political demands were
moot.
In 2008, rocker Cui Jian compared this young generation to the
one that had belted out his songs in Tian​anmen. “The earlier
generation had a very clear direction,” he said. “You know,
liberation, revolution, whatever. The next generation doesn’t believe
in anything—just in what I can get, what I can control in my hand. I
think money is most controllable.”[12]
Those born into this booming era are now referred to (often
pejoratively) as the “post-90s generation (jiulinghou).” According to
one media outlet, these youths are routinely labeled “lazy,
promiscuous, confused, selfish, brain damaged and overall
hopeless.”[13]
But just as occurred previously in the United States and Japan,
China’s unrestrained boom years are giving way to a painful
hangover. Chinese youth are already facing a gamut of problems:
dismal job prospects, out-of-control housing costs, a rapidly aging
population to care for, an unprecedented gender imbalance, and
environmental issues that will strain the entire nation’s ability to
move forward. Amid these woes, will the two-decade-old “Beijing
Consensus” of authoritarian rule in exchange for prosperity continue
to satisfy a generation that takes rapid economic growth for
granted?
This is why the freshman Jun​xun has always intrigued me. In the
span of a few weeks, it seems to force China’s youth into a full-
immersion experience of the Communist Party’s pillars of
persuasion: fear, nationalism, and prosperity. It represents a
microcosm of what the government wants its youth to be: obedient,
patriotic, collectivist, and thankful for the wealth that has been
bestowed upon them. But I wanted to know how well it worked.

15
 In August 2011 I met a young woman (she used her English
name, Rachel) who was preparing to do her Jun​xun. Born in 1992 in
coastal Zhejiang province, she was entering Renmin (People’s)
University, a top college in Beijing famous for its students aspiring to
government careers.
A few days before her Jun​xun was set to begin, when I met with
Rachel at a café on the university campus, she displayed a
refreshing confidence that is rare among students emerging from the
three years of virtual isolation and nonstop study that precede the
gaokao college entrance exam. Just under five feet tall and ninety
pounds, she had never done anything like military training. “I’m very
nervous,” she said of her upcoming Jun​xun.[14]
Rachel had traveled throughout the country with her family and
hoped that her language skills would one day land her a job allowing
her to branch out into the world. The daughter of a middle-class
government official, she, like most Chinese her age, was an only
child. “I’m so lonely,” she said, laughing about her home life. “But I
was very spoiled. I didn’t need to worry about anything.”
Rachel’s upbringing was a world apart from older generations in
her family. Her grandmother was nine years old when her future
husband was selected for her in the late 1940s, after years of civil
war and Japanese invasion. Rachel’s parents were both born in the
early 1960s and bore the brunt of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, eating
tree bark at one point to survive. It was a level of hardship Rachel
has never come close to experiencing herself.
I asked Rachel to keep a diary during her twelve-day Jun​xun to
get a glimpse of how the post-90s generation responds to the
messages contained in this boot camp.

While many universities carry out the training on campus, Rachel
and her classmates were bussed to a special military compound
nestled at the foot of a mountain range twenty-five miles north of
Beijing. “I found myself going back to the 1980s,” Rachel said. “All
the buildings are very old, made of brick. The place we lived in was
very simple.”
She shared a dormitory with nine other young women. The room
contained five bunk beds and a deactivated air conditioner. After
settling in, they were taken to a dining hall with rows of metal tables
but no chairs. “When the drillmaster says you can eat, then you can
eat,” Rachel said. “The dishes are all very salty, so you’ll eat a lot of
rice.”
The nearly six thousand students were given five minutes to
finish their meal and were then herded together to pick up their
army fatigues, which they would not wash or change for the next two

16
weeks. “I really wanted to go back to my school,” Rachel recalled.
The official training began the next morning. Students were
roused at 5 a.m. to run a mile, followed by breakfast and drilling.
“Today’s training was about how to stand,” Rachel wrote in her diary.
“You should stand under the sun straight with your hands at your
side for 10 minutes. Our feet, legs, and knees felt a lot of pain, but
we couldn’t move or we would be required to stand longer. I felt
dizzy.”
Later that day, a young woman in Rachel’s group fainted—a
common occurrence during the training. “Oh, I feel so happy that my
upper eyelids are going to kiss my lower eyelids,” Rachel wrote,
exhausted, as she got into bed that night.
On the second day, Rachel began noticing other expectations.
“No matter whether we walk, eat, take a shower, or even go to the
toilet, we should do it together,” she wrote in her journal. “We should
walk in a line or as a group, and we can’t do it before getting
approval.”
The training that day lasted for eight hours, most of which was
spent learning to walk properly. “Don’t think it’s an easy thing,”
Rachel wrote. “Hundreds of people should walk in the same tempo
like one person. The training is very boring. We have to walk
hundreds of times. Even when we think it’s perfect the drillmasters
still aren’t satisfied.”
Students who made errors were required to do push-ups, run
laps, endure ridicule, and sometimes sing to the rest of the group. “If
you move but don’t tell the master you’ve moved, you’ll be
punished,” Rachel said. “If you wake up late, they’ll punish you. If
they think you’re a little bit tired they’ll punish you at any time for
very little things.”
The trainers ended the first few days with half an hour of
criticism of the students’ performance. By the fourth day, Rachel’s
morale was sinking. “Today was a black day,” she wrote. “The
drillmaster said that I’m a ‘whatever person’ [slang for promiscuous]
just because I wore my pajamas in front of him. I cried. Never have I
felt so homesick.”
Michael Volkin, a US Army sergeant and author of The Ultimate
Basic Training Guidebook, told me that many of the tactics used in
Jun​xun resemble those of US Army basic training. “They’re looking
for people who think they’re individuals and they don’t want
individuals,” he said. “They’re looking for someone who can take
direction and be taught what to do.”[15]
Psychologists would call this process operant conditioning.
Through endless repetition, degradation, and punishment for the
slightest disobedience, an individual becomes conditioned to

17
instinctively obey. The process has long been used in militaries for
training soldiers to kill or march to their deaths upon command
without pausing to question the commander’s wisdom.[16]
I once spoke with a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant in the
People’s Liberation Army who conducted freshman training twice as
a drill sergeant in Nanjing. He agreed that the purpose of the drills
and frequent punishments is to teach students obedience. “They’re
all from the countryside so they’re not used to rules,” he said. “It can
help them have the sense of carrying out orders.”[17] In fact, one of
the officially stated aims of Jun​xun is to “temper [students’]
willpower,” in addition to “building patriotism, collectivism, and
revolutionary heroism” and “developing socialist builders and
successors of the future.”[18]
In the middle of the training, Rachel and her classmates enjoyed
a relatively relaxing day during which they played tug-of-war and
watched a movie about Chinese soldiers. “The movie moved all of us
because the soldier’s life is much harder than ours,” Rachel wrote.
“But he didn’t give up. So how can we want to give up when we just
stand in the sun for a little while? So I’ve changed my mind. I’ll try to
be a stronger person.”
Throughout the two weeks students sang patriotic songs like
“Our Darling Country” and “Without the Communist Party, There
Would Be No New China.” Toward the end, one of the instructors told
the students about life in the real military. He recounted one
occasion when someone in his platoon was beaten into
disfigurement for disobeying orders, and he said that sometimes
soldiers live in the mountains for years at a time without a
telephone. “They showed their loyalty to our country,” Rachel said
after the training. “Thanks to them our country will be safe.”
“Ah,” she said as she sat up laughing when retelling the story.
“This is the aim of the training. You see? I would never say these
things before, but now I’ll say, ‘thanks to the army, thanks to the
Party.’”
The patriotic education that students receive during Jun​xun is
just a small sample of what they have already encountered and will
continue to experience throughout their university education. Nearly
all college students are required to take political courses touting
Marxism and Chinese nationalism. The lessons and historical
narratives presented in these courses are not up for debate, and
students have little choice but to tacitly endorse them if they want to
pass their exams.
If students ever see any information about the Tian​anmen
uprising in textbooks, the exposure is brief and makes clear that the

18
protestors were manipulated and that the military had no choice but
to open fire on them.[19] Garnering sympathy for the PLA, which took
a major hit to its image after Tian​anmen, appears to be another
major goal of Jun​xun.
Young people like Rachel, however, are now accessing
alternative narratives. In 2009, a service was launched that arguably
changed China forever. Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging
platform, was used by one in every two Chinese Internet users by
2012.[20] While Weibo, like the rest of China’s Internet, is heavily
censored, it quickly became a platform for public cynicism that
frequently indicted the official Party line. This development shook up
the very command-and-control model by which the Communist Party
ruled throughout its more than six decades in power. It has forced
the Party to subordinate itself to the will of the people in many
situations.
“This generation tends to be very patriotic,” Guo Baogang,
associate professor of political science at Dalton State College and
author of China’s Quest for Political Legitimacy, told me.[21] “But
they may not swallow the dogmatic teaching from the Party. With the
new technol​ogy I don’t think the Party can use the same techniques
of censorship and thought controls. They have to have a better way
to deal with this group.”[22]
Rachel says that she does not believe her generation will ever be
bold enough to rock the political boat. “Students will never do again
what happened in 1989,” she said. “Even without military training,
their parents would tell them they can’t do this.”
China’s young generation today does indeed have much more to
lose than the Tian​anmen generation did. But while you will not often
see young Chinese holding up democracy banners, their growing
materialism and individualism is a different, subconscious type of
resistance to the lessons put forth in Jun​xun. Chinese society is
quickly evolving—perhaps faster now than the institutions that
govern it—and Jun​xun cadets are no exception.
In recent years, pictures have spread online of rambunctious
post-90s students posing for funny pictures in their army garb and
donning non–standard-issue adornments like colorful hair scrunchies
and nail extensions.[23] When a picture of two freshmen locking lips
in their Jun​xun fatigues gained public notice, it was lambasted on a
national news segment.
On discussion boards highlighting these instances, many lament
that kids these days do not take their military training seriously and
are becoming too open and Westernized.[24] Walk by any Jun​xun
session and you will likely see several iPhones being whipped out

19
during breaks.

Tsinghua University students undergoing Jun​xun military training photograph

their PLA drill instructor during a break.
(Photo: Eric Fish)
Even the bodies of young Chinese appear to be taking a
decidedly more Western turn. A health survey that has been
conducted at Jun​xun six times since it began in 1985 shows that the
fitness level of new students has been steadily declining over the
past three decades, with an increasing number too overweight or out
of shape to take part in the most basic physical activities. The report
said that during the two-week training at Peking University one year,
there were over six thousand doctor visits among the thirty-five
hundred cadets.[25] Often, I have been told, unfit students who are
too tired will simply sit off to the side with little protest from
instructors.
These new dynamics have forced Jun​xun to evolve quietly over
the years. After the disciplinary shock and awe at the beginning of
the training, drill sergeants now tend to tone down their role as
disciplinarians and become more like big brothers to the students.
As all the drilling and marching of Jun​xun neared its end,
Rachel’s attitude toward it turned distinctively more positive. “I’ve
hurt my leg, but I still continue,” she wrote during the last few days
of the drills. “I’ve gone beyond myself. I’ve become stronger, more
independent. I feel proud of myself.”
Across the compound, however, boot camp had turned into more
of a summer camp. Students played games, and one instructor even
brought a case of beer to the men’s dorm. The PLA lieutenant and
former training instructor said that this shift is normal. “You need to

20
give a harsh image to the students so they’re scared of you,” he
said. “But later we get more familiar and have a better relationship,
so we discipline less and less.”
Several days after returning to campus, Rachel downplayed the
suggestion that the training might be a form of political
indoctrination. “There’s a little bit maybe,” she said. “We’ll do what
they tell us during the training, but afterwards we have our own
minds. If you tell me to do something now, I won’t do it. If this is the
purpose, it didn’t work so well.”
When asked whether the training had changed him in any way,
one of Rachel’s classmates, Li, thought for a moment about the long
days under the hot sun. “It changed my skin color,” he replied
dismissively.[26]
The PLA lieutenant agreed that the training probably does not
have the same effect as in the past. “We’re told to obey—obey the
Party and the school,” he said. “But post-90s students are influenced
by the West more and have their own character. They tend to ask
‘why?’ much more than the older generation.”
It is hard to say what lasting effects Jun​xun actually has on
students. Many of the lessons that it tries to instill appear to fall on
very cynical ears, but it does not seem to be an empty ritual either.
When I have spoken with students about Jun​xun, they have
rarely expressed hostility toward it. Over the years, young people
have suggested all kinds of purposes for it, including national
defense, discipline, student orientation, shock therapy for spoiled
children, garnering sympathy for soldiers, and instilling love for and
obedience to the state. But most agree that the experience is
positive, at both the individual and national levels. A 2005 survey
carried out by China Youth Daily and the online media company Sina
found that 69 percent of the respondents who had undergone the
training felt that it was worthwhile.[27]
Michael Volkin, the US Army sergeant, described the benefits of
this kind of training and synchronized drilling. “Everyone is going to
come out with more confidence and a camaraderie they’ve never
had before,” he said. “That’s the real mental reason why you do the
cadence. It’s [also] to follow directions, but the real reason is so you
can feel as one with the people around you.”
Although he cynically claimed that his skin color was the only
thing changed by Jun​xun, Rachel’s classmate Li did not appear
completely unmoved. “I think the military training is meant to show
your life now is very good,” he said. “Everyone should know what
the hard life is like so you’ll know the life you have now is very
happy.”

21
 Time and time again, the young Chinese with whom I have
spoken have demurred when asked why they do not resist the
principles that Jun​xun (in theory) aims to instill—the propaganda, the
insistence on obedience, and the constant reminder that if you are
the nail that sticks out, you will be hammered down. “It’s something
we all know, but it’s pointless to fight it,” they will sometimes say,
or, more often, “You may not understand it, but it’s necessary for the
cohesion and harmony of the country.”
But more and more voices of cynicism and dissent are emerging.
As the Nanjing lieutenant noticed with his post-90s cadets, young
people who feel things are not the way they should be are finding
the temerity to ask, “Why?” In 2014, military training at one high
school turned violent when students resisted their drill masters. The
facts were disputed, but after a lighthearted quarrel between an
instructor and a female cadet, the males in her class were punished
with push-ups, to which they protested. Later in the day, a group of
drunk military instructors allegedly sought revenge for the students’
disobedience and attacked the young men, leaving several
hospitalized.[28]
The episode set off a national debate about the role of Jun​xun in
modern China. “Student military training has no use whatsoever,”
wrote one famous artist. “It’s an education in how to be a slave, of a
kind that should only exist in totalitarian countries like North Korea.
Are we trying to cultivate a healthy, independent and freethinking
populace or a bunch of obedient machines?”[29] As others saw it
though, these post-90s youth were simply displaying the spoiled
attitude and disobedience for which their generation had become
infamous, and reaffirmed exactly why China needed student military
training in the first place.
This common view among older generations in China has
become a source of resentment among many post-90s, as they
struggle to express that they do not have it so easy. In coming years,
China will experience earthshaking demographic and economic shifts
that are already becoming highly disruptive to the life that the post-
90s generation has become accustomed to. Various issues that
contributed to the standoff at Tian​anmen are reemerging in new
forms, accompanied this time by a fresh set of challenges that the
world has never seen before.
The educated elite like Rachel are facing a hypercompetitive job
market and learning that the path to success they were promised
may no longer exist. Meanwhile, the blue-collar class is finding the
gap between themselves and the privileged growing ever wider.
Gang Guo, a specialist in Chinese politics at the University of

22
Mississippi, told me that China’s political future may depend on how
this young generation is treated. “Unemployment among educated
youth and inequality of opportunity are a combination that could be
as dangerous in China as in the Arab world,” he said, referring to the
2011 Jasmine Revolution.[30]
Still, opportunities exist for those who know where to look for
them. China’s consumer class continues to grow and the country
harbors nearly infinite economic possibilities. But even success
brings its own problems, as the social order is scrambled and China’s
capitalist excesses clash with the socialist veneer that the
Communist Party still struggles to uphold. As a result the Chinese
have been left unsure of what to believe in or what moral code
should be their guide.[31] “Many people in society feel kind of lost,”
said Yang Fenggang, the Purdue sociologist. “There are so many
incidents that reflect this, like when an old man falls in the street and
people don’t know whether they should help.”
Rachel too laments that her hometown has gotten rich but is
losing its soul. She admires Western-style freedoms but is not sure if
they are worth fighting for in China, or whether they would even
work there. She loves her country and says she believes in it, but
does not think she would stick around if an opportunity to leave
presented itself. She is both optimistic about China’s future and
terrified of how she will fare after graduation and provide for her
parents when they are old. She is confident about China’s rise on the
world stage, but anxious about its growing domestic troubles. These
are the dilemmas that one struggles to reconcile when speaking of
Chinese youth and how they will shape the country’s future.
On her last night at the military compound, Rachel wrote the
final entry in her journal: “I’m stronger now. Never again will I cry
just because of a little pain. Growing up is a cruel thing. You must
bear the pain and try to stand up again after you fall down. You
should learn to smile and face all the difficulties until you finally
come to the top of the mountain.”
While Rachel still had a long way to climb, she had already
conquered one of the greatest challenges facing Chinese youth: she
had been admitted to one of China’s most prestigious universities. It
is a dream that nearly every Chinese family has for their child, and
one that is reserved for a precious few. For every young student like
Rachel that pushes to the front of the pack, dozens lag behind with
an even more uncertain future.
1. “Freshmen Fall In!” Global Times, September 10, 2009. Accessed
November 13, 2013.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/732227.shtml.

23
2. Pan, Kai. “Military Training for China’s University Students”
(video). CNReviews (blog), September 5, 2009. Accessed November
13, 2013. http://cnreviews.com/life/society-culture/military-training-
china-university-students-video_20090905.html.
3. Yang, Fenggang. Telephone interview by author, November 2011.
4. Yang, Yi. “Tian​anmen Square Protest and College Job Placement
Reform in the 1980s.” Journal of Contemporary China 17, no. 7
(2014): 965–81.
5. Zhao, Dingxin. The Power of Tian​anmen State-Society Relations
and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001.
6. Vogel, Ezra F. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011,
600.
7. The Gate of Heavenly Peace (documentary). Long Bow Group Inc.
1995. Transcript, http://citationmachine.net/index2.php?
reqstyleid=0&stylebox=10.
8. WuDunn, Sheryl. “Chinese College Freshmen to Join Army First.”
New York Times, August 15, 1989.
9. Mason, David, and Jonathan Clements. “Tian​anmen Square
Thirteen Years After: The Prospects for Civil Unrest in China.” Asian
Affairs 29, no. 3 (2002): 166.
10. World Bank 2014 Data; Yeung, Wei-Jun J. “China’s Higher
Education Expansion and Social Stratification.” Asia Research
Institute Working Paper Series 199 (2013): 3.
11. Yang, Wanli. “At 97m and Growing, China Has Most Outbound
Tourists.” China Daily, January 9, 2014. Accessed October 1, 2014.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014–
01/09/content_17224806.htm.
12. Larsson, Milene. “Vice Meets Cui Jian” (interview, podcast video).
Vice, August 27, 2008. Accessed February 23, 2014.
http://www.vice.com/vice-meets/cui-jian.
13. “How Will China’s Tech-Savvy, Post-90s Generation Shape the
Nation?” CNN, July 19, 2010. Accessed November 13, 2013.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/07/18/china.post90s.generation/
14. “Rachel.” Interview by author, Beijing, August-September 2011.
Some quotations first appeared in Fish, Eric. “March of the
Freshmen.” Foreign Policy, November 10, 2011.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/10/march_of_the_freshmen
15. Volkin, Michael. Telephone interview by author, August 2011.
First quoted in Fish, “March of the Freshmen.” For further reading see
Volkin, Michael C. The Ultimate Basic Training Guidebook. New York:
Savas Beatie LLC, 2005.
16. Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning

24
to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.
17. PLA Lieutenant. Interview by author, Beijing, October 2011.
18. “” [Opinions from the Ministry of Education on Issues Relating
to High School Student Military Training]. Ministry of Education of
China, 2002.
http://www.moe.gov.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/s3289/201001/xxgk_81
19. Lim, Louisa. The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tian​anmen
Revisited, 107–8. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
20. “30th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China.”
Beijing: China Internet Network Information Center, 2012.
21. Guo, Baogang. China’s Quest for Political Legitimacy: The New
Equity-Enhancing Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.
22. Guo, Baogang. Telephone interview by author, September 2011.
First quoted in Fish, “March of the Freshmen.” For further reading see
Guo, China’s Quest for Political Legitimacy.
23. “90” [Female Post-90s Students Wearing Earrings and Painted
Nails for Military Training Cause Heated Discussion]. news.163.com,
September 19, 2008. Accessed October 7, 2014.
http://news.163.com/08/0919/04/4M674J3A00011229.html.
24. “Female Post-90s Students Wearing Earrings.” Comments
Section. 163.com.
25. Zhang, Guo. “ ‘’” [Education ‘Devastated,’ Freshmen
Cited Poor Health Concerns as the Main Reason]. China Youth Daily,
September 17, 2012. Accessed November 13, 2013.
http://news.yunnan.cn/html/2012–09/17/content_2405675.htm.
26. Li. Interview by author, Beijing, September 2011; Fish, “March of
the Freshmen.”
27. Zhang, Zhuo. “20 ” [After 20 Years of Military Training,
Nearly 70 Percent of College Students Find It Worthwhile]. China
Youth Daily and Sina, September 26, 2005.
28. Davis, Becky. “Violence at Chinese High School Raises Questions
about Mandatory Military Training.” New York Times, August 28,
2014.
29. Davis, “Violence at Chinese High School.”
30. Gang, Guo. Telephone interview by author, September 2011;
Fish, “March of the Freshmen.”
31. Wang, Xiaoying. “The Post-Communist Personality: The Spectre
of China’s Capitalist Market Reforms.” China Journal 47 (2002): 1–17.

25
 Chapter 2
The Test
As long as I have known Emily Fang, she has been preparing for
a test.
We met through a family connection in 2009 in her hometown of
Qingzhou, a city of about two hundred thousand in coastal Shandong
province. She was then a scraggly fourteen-year-old with thick
glasses who was always laughing at something. Born into a middle-
class family with a comfortable two-story home, she had never had
to worry about much more than her schooling.
Emily loved to gossip about classmates and celebrities, and she
spent much of her spare time immersed in Korean soap operas.
Unfortunately, she rarely had much time to spare.
The gaokao college entrance exam was still four years away, but
it was never far from the front of Emily’s mind. She was about to
start her last year of middle school, at the end of which she would
take a test. This test would decide whether she would gain entry to a
good high school and thereby have a better chance at passing the
college entrance exam three years later. That, in turn, was the only
way in which she could be assured a good white-collar job. As the
family’s only child, she would need a good career to help her provide
for her parents when they aged. The family was constantly
considering these long-term issues and then pursuing the solutions
to them with tunnel vision. For most of Emily’s childhood, the next
step involved passing a test.
China has a 1,500-year history of using exams to choose
scholars and civil servants based on merit. After the disruption of
higher education during the Cultural Revolution, China’s gaokao
college entrance exam resumed in 1977. Since then it has changed
in many ways, but it has remained the same in its high stakes.
Each June, graduating high school seniors spend two to three
days taking this written exam, which in most cases is the sole
deciding factor that determines which (if any) university they will be
admitted to and what they can major in. The test has traditionally
been given just once a year, so a bad performance means settling
for a blue-collar future or waiting another year to try again. Chinese
youth spend years preparing themselves for those few days.
I was the first foreigner Emily had ever met—someone totally
removed from her world and all the complications that came with it.
Over the coming years, that relationship would make me a
convenient outlet for her mounting pressure.
Whenever I came to Qingzhou I would chat with Emily as much
as I could, but we would inevitably be cut short by her need to study.

26
That study paid off, though. At the end of ninth grade, her test
performance got her into the city’s best high school. To celebrate,
her family brought her on a trip to Nanjing where I was living. “I’m
quite happy!” she said when she arrived. For that week she was free
to eat, sleep, and play around to her heart’s content. She could
come up to the surface and take a deep breath.
But the respite was short. When she returned home, the three
years of pre-gaokao hell began.
After her first semester of high school I stayed with Emily’s
family for a few days and could tell the heat was already on. Emily’s
study breaks were shorter and her playful demeanor more subdued.
One night, her parents went out and left the two of us home
alone. A few minutes after they left, she started sobbing. “There’s so
much pressure,” she said, burying her face in my shoulder.
“Everyone wants so much from me. I don’t know if I can pass. If I
don’t, they’ll be so disappointed in me.”
This is how it would go for the next two years. She seemed
gradually busier and more exasperated each time I talked to her. In
January of her senior year, I saw her one last time before she took
the test. By then Emily was seventeen, still a puny ninety pounds
and perpetually exhausted. Each day she went to school from 7:30
a.m. to 10:00 p.m. with a two-hour lunch. She got Saturday
afternoons and Sunday mornings off—usually. If there was a topic
that would not be tested on the gaokao, Emily’s teachers did not
waste time on it. That time was for test cramming and nothing else.
Any distractions—such as makeup, social clubs, or dating—were
forbidden.
Every night at 10:15, Emily’s mother waited anxiously at the
front door for her to return home. Upon arriving on her electric bike,
Emily would lean on her horn in annoyance. Her mom bolted out the
door to open the courtyard gate, but no matter how fast she came
out, Emily was still irritated. She was running on fumes already and
vented her frustration at the routine setback of having to wait ten
seconds to get in the house.
When she got in the front door, her mom hustled her over to a
warm footbath that she had prepared. Any precious second wasted
was a second lost from study or sleep. But once she sat down to her
footbath, she was allowed to unwind and clear her head for just a
few minutes. It was the one window of time where I could talk to her.
The topic, of course, was always how miserable her day was.
After we chatted for about five minutes, her mom handed her a
textbook and I took my cue to head off to bed. This was just the
beginning of Emily’s night.
Her bedtime varied. On a rare good night, it would be a little

27
after midnight. I once woke up to use the bathroom at 2:30 a.m. and
found her passed out, her head on a book. “I’m just taking a little
rest,” she uttered pathetically, looking up, as if she needed to justify
the catnap to me.
Mom would rouse her at 6:30 a.m. and they would bargain over
whether Emily could have a few more minutes of sleep. Emily never
won this negotiation. Once she was up, she would do a little morning
studying, make quick work of her breakfast, and be out the door.
After subtracting the commute, Emily had an hour and a half at
home for lunch. I was told by her parents ever so politely, but in no
uncertain terms, that I was to be out of the house during that period.
Emily did not have time to be distracted by me. She would gobble
her lunch in a matter of minutes and then go straight to bed for
some precious afternoon Zs—unless she still had unfinished
homework, of course.
After several more hours of drilling and practice tests at school,
she would come home and repeat the process. As I headed to bed
each night, I would tell her, “Don’t work too hard.” I was the only one
doling out such advice.
Some family members persuaded Emily’s parents that the brain
needs time to relax, so at some point they became a bit easier on
her. On Saturday afternoons she would be allowed to watch soap
operas and talk with me for a little while before being directed back
to her study desk. Many of her classmates had their faces stuffed in
books at every waking moment or had a study session with an
outside tutor arranged during this time.
Teachers and parents were perfectly aware of how much stress
this put on the kids. They occasionally tried organizing activities to
relieve the pressure and allow some semblance of socializing. But
these occasions were too little and too contrived. Shortly before my
visit, they had held a class dinner to celebrate the New Year, but it
was more like being let out of the dungeon to have a nice meal with
the other captives. The students were happy to have it, but it was
not exactly a festive atmosphere. Everyone spent the evening
complaining to one another.

While Emily’s Western counterparts can look back at high school
with memories of parties, proms, sports, and all kinds of pointless
time-killing shenanigans, Emily will have only memories of soul-
crushing routine. And she is hardly alone.
Each year nine million high school seniors across China spend
their days like Emily, cramming their heads with anything that might
show up on the gaokao. Then in the weeks leading up to the exam, a
sort of national hysteria takes hold. Young girls take birth control pills

28
to prevent their periods from falling on exam day. Crowds flock to
Buddhist temples to light prayer sticks. Hucksters make a killing with
expensive remedies promising to enhance brain power. And a few
schools even provide IV drips for students cramming around the
clock.
For some kids, the pressure proves too great. Every year, several
gaokao-related suicides are reported in Chinese media. And every
year, stories of families going to bizarre lengths to free their child of
distractions come to light. In 2012, it was reported that twelve days
before the gaokao a car accident had killed one student’s mother
and left his father in intensive care. Traffic police and the rest of the
boy’s family worked together to hide the news from him until after
the test.[1]
Because of all these pressures, some Chinese youth have taken
to calling themselves “the Damaged Generation.”[2] With the gaokao
being the key source of that damage, there is nearly universal
consensus that it is a terrible system. Unfortunately, coming up with
an alternative has proven problematic.
Corruption and nepotism pervade every corner of Chinese
society, and education is not immune to it. From admission to
prestigious schools all the way down to where a child sits in class,
preferential education opportunities can be bought or obtained
through connections.[3] Starting from kindergarten, spots at top
public schools in major cities—which are supposed to be allotted
based on the parents’ residence—are in practice often handed out to
those who have powerful contacts or who fork over illegal
“donations” to school administrators looking to supplement their
income.[4]
The gaokao was intended to be the final defense against those
who would leverage their wealth and connections to compensate for
their child’s lack of scholastic ability. For whatever inequality exists
up through high school, at least the gaokao ensures that college
admission is truly reserved for the best and brightest. At least, that
is how it works in theory.
The biggest criticism of the exam tends to be that its emphasis
on rote memorization of certain subjects leaves behind creative
students who thrive under less conventional circumstances. When
reporters catch up with top gaokao scorers years later, rarely have
these former prodigies achieved anything more than midlevel
business success. Most of China’s Nobel Prize winners and prominent
entrepreneurs were educated overseas.
The subject matter tested in the gaokao gives a pretty good idea
of just what skills students learn in high school. Once, while studying

29
for the English portion of the exam, Emily asked me when you should
say “it’s my pleasure” as opposed to simply “my pleasure” in English
conversation. I had to admit that I did not know, and that it was a
pretty pointless distinction in terms of actually being able to
communicate in English. But sure enough, there was a “correct”
answer to this multiple-choice question.
I flipped through the textbook and found pages full of similar
hair-splitting drivel, some of which was flat-out wrong. I asked Emily
what exactly they teach her in school all day. “We write many
passages,” she said. “And then they tell us how we should write it
better [for the essay portion of the gaokao].”
“You know, it’s not like Mo Yan,” she continued, referring to the
self-educated Chinese Nobel laureate in literature. “He tells very
interesting stories, but we can’t write anything like that. If I write
what I want, I’ll fail.”
She was probably right. Even for the gaokao essays, which are
supposed to give students a chance to demonstrate their creativity
and writing ability, taboo answers can result in complete failure.
In one alleged story from 2010, a student used her gaokao essay
to deliver a scathing social commentary on the breakdown of
Chinese society. “I want to find my childhood back,” it read.
“Because back then dried milk was used as gifts rather than poison;
houses were meant to shelter people, not to kill people; trenches
were used to drain flooded fields, not to collect used old oil from; the
hospital did not try to rob every dime out of people’s pockets but
actually treated the patients; education was not regarded as a
means to power and fortune but something that brings positive
changes to life; tall buildings were not used to jump off from but as
places where people can enjoy nice scenery.”[5]
Though it is hard to verify the veracity of such essays, it has
been reported anecdotally that answers indicting Chinese society
routinely receive crippling scores of zero, effectively barring students
who are outspoken in their off-message political beliefs from seeking
higher education. This, some scholars argue, is precisely the aim of
high-stakes testing in China.
The gaokao has roots in an imperial exam system designed
specifically for the purposes of social control. Nearly 1,500 years
ago, the keju exam system was formally established under a Sui
dynasty emperor concerned with keeping China unified under his
rule, and it was later perfected during the prosperous Tang dynasty.
The exams tested Confucian classics, which stressed obedience to
authority and the importance of stability and harmony. Success on
the test could lead to prestigious and lucrative positions high into
the government and, contrary to previous systems that heavily

30
favored the hereditary aristocracy, it was open to the masses. It
gave hope to everyone that if they just worked hard, they could
climb to a high position in the social order.[6]
While the system indeed allowed peasants to become nobles,
keju was most effective at keeping those at the very top in power
and unchallenged. The government controlled all roads to success,
meaning that no matter what a man’s talent was, he devoted all his
time and energy toward learning the skills, knowledge, and
philosophies predetermined by the country’s rulers. Those who
demonstrated the highest aptitude for Confucian values tested into
the government bureaucracy. They became adamant defenders of
the existing social order that had put them there and were forever
loyal to the emperor. Meanwhile, anyone who might otherwise have
been inclined to challenge the status quo could scarcely come up
with the skills, time, or manpower to mount an opposition. Everyone
was too busy studying for the exam.[7]
Yong Zhao, a University of Oregon education professor and
author of the book Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China
Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World, argues that
in many ways, the gaokao college entrance exam is just a
continuation of keju. “College is still a gateway to most social
mobility opportunities in China,” Zhao told me. “So if you want to
gain access to that channel, you have to go through the gaokao and
comply with what the government authorities subscribe as the
content, skills and knowledge.”[8]
One of the reasons that keju was such an effective tool of social
control was that even those who failed still believed they had had a
fair chance. Little did they know that throughout the centuries the
system was usually plagued by cheating and corruption.
With the gaokao’s similarly high stakes in modern China, more
than a handful of resourceful students also try to give themselves an
edge on exam day. Each year thousands are caught trying to cheat,
and dozens, sometimes hundreds, of teachers, parents, and
organized gangs are arrested for facilitating the cheating. In some
cases, they can be imprisoned for up to three years on charges of
“stealing state secrets.”[9] Tactics range from rudimentary instant
messaging on cell phones all the way to earpieces and miniature
television screens built into classroom rulers. In 2014 in inland
Henan province, 127 students were found to have hired surrogate
test takers, some of whom had used special film to fool fingerprint
scanners or bribed test proctors to turn a blind eye.[10]
The Education Ministry has consistently vowed to crack down on
increasingly sophisticated cheating methods. Those who write the

31
questions for the gaokao are kept in secluded, top-secret facilities
under armed guard without access to communication devices until
after the test is administered. It is not uncommon for students to go
through a metal detector and fingerprint scanner, be strip-searched,
and take the exam under multiple video cameras as police roam
outside with radio signal detectors.[11]
But enforcement is uneven. When local proctors oversee the
testing of their community’s children, they are sometimes
sympathetically lax. For years the small town of Zhongxiang, Hubei
province, had performed suspiciously well on the gaokao, prompting
the provincial education ministry to send in outside monitors for the
2013 exam. After test takers were blindsided by unusually strict
checks and droves were busted trying to cheat, there was a near riot
among two thousand parents outside a high school. Mindful of how
widely cheating was still tolerated in other areas, they ironically
chanted, “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us
cheat.”[12]
Fear of cheating is one of the main impediments to serious
gaokao reform. Under a more rounded, Western-style evaluation
system that factored in grades, essays, interviews, and
extracurricular activities, there would undoubtedly be widespread
cheating and bribery. A 2010 paper by Zinch China, an education
consultancy to American colleges about China, estimated that
roughly 90 percent of Chinese undergraduate applications to foreign
universities contained falsified information of some kind, such as
outsourced essays or grades altered by unscrupulous high school
administrations.[13]
Starting in the early 2000s, some colleges were allowed to select
a certain quota of students using measures other than the gaokao,
or let students add points to their score based on academic, artistic,
or athletic achievements. But these alternatives have also been
fraught with cheaters. One school, for instance, offered extra gaokao
points to those who could run a marathon exceptionally fast. At the
Xiamen International Marathon that year, more than thirty youths
were caught trying to cut ahead on the course or hiring professional
runners to carry their timing chips.[14] In many other cases, school
administrators were found to have simply sold spaces reserved for
special talents to the highest bidder. In 2014, it was announced that
these allotments would be phased out due to overwhelming abuse
and corruption.[15]
Some reforms should be relatively easy to carry out, though. The
aspect of the gaokao that most undercuts its claim of ensuring
egalitarianism is how greatly it disadvantages rural students. Not

32
only do students in cities like Beijing and Shanghai attend higher-
quality schools than rural youths, but they also have lower standards
for acceptance to the nation’s top colleges.
Since China’s top two universities (Tsinghua and Peking) are
located in Beijing, the schools set aside a higher quota for students
with a Beijing hukou residence permit. In 2013, eighty-four out of
every ten thousand Beijing students who took the gaokao gained
admission to one of those two universities, whereas only three of
every ten thousand students from inland Henan province were
accepted.[16]
In 1958, the Chinese government instituted its hukou residence
system in order to control population distribution and the general
movement of its people.[17] Though the policy has loosened over the
years, it remains in place and continues to be likened to a caste
system or “peasant apartheid.”[18] According to the policy, citizens
are classified as either rural or urban and are largely tied to their
birthplace by regional restrictions on education, medical care, and
other social services (which are much better in cities). It is extremely
difficult for anyone from the countryside to switch to an urban
hukou, and nearly impossible for blue-collar workers. Thus, rural
migrants doing labor in cities usually must leave their children
behind to attend school where their hukou is registered, or place
them in low-quality unofficial schools for migrant children in the city.
But even if a student from Henan lived his or her whole life in
Beijing with parents who worked in the city, that student would still
have to return home to take a different exam from the one for which
the Beijing school had prepared its students. And such students
would still be excluded from the preferential Beijing quotas, simply
because their parents had not been able to obtain a local hukou.
A number of regions, including Beijing, have announced planned
reforms allowing students to sit for the gaokao where they live rather
than where their hukou is. But this proposal has received stiff
opposition from locals who worry that the reforms would hurt their
own children’s educational prospects and encourage a flood of
migrants.
Even if these reforms are introduced nationwide, students from
rural provinces will still be severely disadvantaged when compared
to those from the coastal regions where the bulk of China’s
education investment has gone. Since 1995, 117 top universities
have been targeted for substantial central government investment
under Project 211. Students in Beijing have twenty-six of these
schools locally. Coastal Jiangsu province has eleven. But in Henan
province, with a total population of 94 million, there is just one

33
Project 211 university.[19]

In 2012, I came across a report that dozens of young people had
been robbed of thousands of dollars and years of their life through
an education scam. When I tracked down some of the victims, I was
hardly surprised to learn that they were from Henan, and that their
nightmare had begun with failing the gaokao.
I met three of the young men in Jinan, the provincial capital of
Shandong province, where they had been lured by the scam. All
were born in 1989 to farmer parents in a rural Henan town that had
little besides cornfields and small concrete homes. Despite what
they had been through, I was surprised to see how upbeat they
were. Like many people I had met from the countryside, they
immediately peppered me with their own questions about the world
outside of China before I had a chance to ask them anything. On the
outside, they appeared perfectly acclimated to city life, wearing the
same clothes as locals and revealing only a hint of their Henan
accents. But on the inside, they were still struggling to break free of
their rural upbringing.
The three had similar stories. Like many poor peasants in the
region, their parents had transitioned from full-time farmers to
migrant workers during the 1990s when China’s economic boom
took off. Since then, the parents had drifted from city to city, working
in construction, while the kids stayed behind with their grandparents
to attend school.
Kids in this situation have come to be known as “left-behind
children”—a reference not only to being physically left behind, but
also to how they are often left behind peers emotionally and
academically due to a lack of parental care and educational support.
As of 2013, China had an estimated 61 million left-behind children.
[20]
The Henan boys’ parents had spent their lives doing strenuous
labor in one form or another with very meager wages to show for it.
But they had made the most of those wages. Ever since their kids
were in diapers, they had been saving every penny that they did not
need for food and shelter. For them, securing a quality education for
their children was nonnegotiable. It was the only way for the family’s
next generation to change its fate. So the family scrimped and saved
for that education while constantly reminding their children to do
their part and pass their exams.
In the end, though, none of them quite made the cut. One of the
boys, Chuankai, scored high enough on the gaokao to qualify for an
obscure three-year college, but being unable to attend a four-year
university was a major blow to his family. He decided to study for

34
another year and try again.
Another of the boys, Yang Yang, was ready to throw in the towel
completely. He had never really wanted to go to college anyway, and
he knew a friend who was making a small fortune as a jade
merchant. He figured he would be better off just starting his own
small business.
But those plans changed within a few weeks. The boys all got
calls from a Shandong college recruiter, who had presumably paid
the high school for gaokao failures’ contact information. He told the
boys there was a way that they could still start at a four-year
university in the coming semester. At the prodding of their parents,
the boys all went to hear him out.
“He was a very inspiring speaker,” Chuankai recalled. “He talked
about how society is and how we could have prosperous jobs. The
recruiting brochures said the school had all these certifications, but it
meant nothing to us. We didn’t know what schools needed to be
legitimate.”[21]
The recruiter said that after graduating, the students could even
be hired to teach at the school. In spite of their parents’ initial
skepticism, the boys were sold. It was going to cost them, though.
The first year’s tuition was 10,000 yuan ($1,600), about twice
the cost of a subsidized public university. For Chuankai’s parents, it
was an enormous amount of money. But they decided that they
could borrow from family and neighbors later if necessary. Any
sacrifice was worth the chance to see their son empowered to
change his fate. Chuankai and the others were off to Jinan that
September.
Altogether, about sixty other students showed up at the
“university,” which was a building rented out from a legitimate local
college. But recruiting must have been more difficult than expected,
because a few months later they were moved to a smaller building
across town.
It did not take long for the students to start noticing other
suspicious things. They had seen the head of the school, Zhao
Lianshan, several times at the old campus, but after the move they
never saw him again. And the already heavy restrictions on the
students started getting worse, to the point that they were allowed
to leave school only once a week to run errands.
At some point during the spring semester, the school said it
needed the students’ tuition receipts back and would pay 300 yuan
($48) for them. Most complied, happy to get the money. “People in
the countryside are very honest,” Chuankai said. “So we had no
sense of law.”
A few started getting suspicious and demanded to see Zhao

35
Lianshan. But whenever they got worked up, some of the class
leaders would calm them down and dissuade them from pressing the
issue.
That April, though, seven months after classes had begun, the
whole thing fell apart. Students were called together by a hapless
middleman and told that the school was out of money. He said they
should all go out and find something else to do.
Most were furious, and a few suggested calling the police. But
again the student leaders talked them down, saying there was no
point. Chuan​kai later realized that those students were probably
being bribed by Zhao Lianshan all along. But since most no longer
had their receipts, trying to get their money back was indeed a lost
cause. In the end, one student did call the police, who told him that
Zhao had already been reported for running another fake school and
that there was nothing they could do at the moment.
“The only thing I learned at that school was not to trust
anybody,” Chuankai said. “I got hurt badly. My first contact with
society was full of lies.”
The school fell apart in 2010, but incredibly, Zhao Lianshan had
been running a similar scam across town at the same time, one that
would not be uncovered until 2012. The victims there were even less
fortunate. They had been told they were getting degrees at the
relatively well-known Shandong Institute of Light Industry. Not until
they “graduated” after four years did they discover that the school
where they had been studying was not affiliated with the institute or
officially registered in any way. Their four years of study were
essentially meaningless and they were out tens of thousands of
yuan. Eventually Zhao was arrested, but by then he had no money
left.
Situations like this one have become ubiquitous. In 2013 a
private education firm published a list of fake universities known to
be operating in China; the list contained at least seventy in Beijing
alone.[22] Many institutions like these are diploma mills where
students knowingly participate in the fiction, but in some cases, like
those in Jinan, students are deceived into thinking they are working
toward a legitimate degree. These scams prey heavily on rural
families desperate to get their kids an education. Their tight-knit
communities where everyone knows each other leave them naïve
and vulnerable to outside con men.
The three young men had stayed in Jinan since their school
folded, and none had ever had the nerve to tell their parents what
happened. “In the countryside, gossip is really bad,” Chuankai said.
“Neighbors all know you’re studying, so if you come back [without a
degree] it brings a kind of shame.”

36
 Yang Yang cut his losses and started studying e-commerce at a
private three-year college the autumn after the school failed,
conveniently allowing him to keep up the pretense with his family
that he was getting a four-year degree.
Zheng, the third young man, continued to study for the gaokao
while working to support himself. He was employed at a grocery
store, earning 1,000 to 2,000 yuan ($160 to $320) per month, 500
yuan of which went straight to the monthly rent. Sometimes he
worked as long as two months without a day off, leaving little time to
make progress in his gaokao study.
Zheng says he would give up on the gaokao if he found a stable
job that could ensure that he would always have enough to eat. But
even that is difficult. “I feel very different from local Jinan people,”
he said. “I feel inferior. Many hire locals instead of us. Local people
are rich and have connections, so it is easier for them to get jobs.”
Chuankai remained intent on eventually passing the gaokao and
gaining admission to Beijing’s prestigious Renmin University. But he
faced the same economic hurdles. His family did not have any
money left to send him, so he took up selling small goods on the
roadside. He made about 40 to 50 yuan ($6.40 to $8) per day, but on
several occasions he had his products confiscated by chengguan
(city management officers). Keeping ahead of his expenses left him
with very little time to study.
“I feel like I’m at the bottom of society,” he said. “I’m not doing
well in school or life. I’m working hard, but not doing anything for my
future that I can put on my résumé.”
When I asked what role he thought China’s education system
had played in his tough luck, Chuankai said, “The gaokao isn’t a
good system, but you can’t make a better system. It really needs to
be equal, though. Why is it easier for Beijingers than people from
other provinces?”
When Emily Fang finally took her gaokao in June 2013, she also
scored too low to get into a good four-year university. Fortunately,
her family earned enough that she could devote the following year
exclusively to study—a luxury the young men from Henan did not
have. After her second go at the gaokao, she gained admittance to
an upper-tier university. Once again, the young men’s poor rural
background precluded them from the same opportunities available
to middle-class urban families.
In late 2014, the Chinese government announced that it would
be phasing in gaokao reforms, seeking to raise university quotas for
those from poorer regions and relieve pressure by switching from a
one-time exam to three exams spread across high school. Other
possible changes discussed included shifting from provincially

37
administered tests to a single national exam, as well as factoring in
students’ “moral character” in college admissions. Yong Zhao, the
University of Oregon professor, says there are both positive and
worrisome implications to these proposed gaokao reforms. On one
hand, they look to ensure better egalitarianism and relieve some
pressure, but on the other hand, the suggestions of nationalizing the
test content and adding a morality requirement could be moves to
assert greater central government control. “Moral character really
talks about whether students comply well with teachers,” Zhao told
me, “because the ones who write the comments and [judge
morality] will likely be teachers and others supposed to be
representing the government.”
With all the hardships associated with the gaokao, it might seem
that simply skipping it and pursuing an increasingly lucrative
vocational line of work would be a more desirable option. When I
suggested to Chuankai that university degrees do not carry the
same weight that they used to in China, and that he might be better
off financially with a technical education, he demurred. “I thought
about going to technical school when my college went bankrupt,” he
said. “But my classmates criticized me. They said, ‘Your parents
saved for you to go to college. How could you use their money for
technical school?’”
The last time I spoke with him, he was preparing to take the
gaokao for the fourth time. In the meantime, he was selling school
supplies on a blanket outside a local university’s gates, clinging to
the hope that one day he would be allowed to study inside.
1. “12” [After Exam, Test Taker Learns Mother Died 12 Days Prior].
news.163.com, June 10, 2012.
http://news.163.com/photoview/00AP0001/24302.html.
2. Schmitz, Rob. “The Damaged Generation.” Marketplace, June 6,
2011. Accessed October 28, 2014.
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/chinopoly/damaged-generation.
3. Wu, Hongchao. “Analysis on the Reasons and Countermeasures for
Educational Corruption.” Huazhong Normal University, 2006.
4. Levin, Dan. “A Chinese Education, for a Price.” New York Times,
November 21, 2012. Accessed December 12, 2013.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/world/asia/in-china-schools-a-
culture-of-bribery-spreads.html?
pagewanted=all&_r=0&gwh=0C0DC14DF90D43513B24FF7F1EA652BF
5. Beaton, Jessica. “The Worst of the 2010 Gaokao Essays.” CNN,
June 25, 2010. Accessed December 12, 2013.
http://travel.cnn.com/shanghai/life/worst-2010-goakao-essay-
312786.
6. Kracke, E. A. “Region, Family, and Individual in the Chinese

38
Examination System.” In Chinese Thoughts & Institutions. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1967.
7. Zhao, Yong. “The Emperors’ Game.” In Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad
Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in
the World. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2014.
8. Zhao, Yong. Telephone interview by author, September 2014; for
further reading see Zhao, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon.
9. Branigan, Tania. “China Jails Teachers and Parents for Hi-tech
Exam Cheating.” The Guardian, April 3, 2009. Accessed December
12, 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/03/china-jails-
exam-cheats.
10. Zheng, Jinran. “Gaokao Ghostwriters to Face Punishment.” China
Daily, June 18, 2014. Accessed June 20, 2014.
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-
06/18/content_17595912.htm.
11. Beaton, Jessica. “10 Million Chinese Students, Metal Detectors
and Danish Fishermen: It’s the Gaokao.” CNN, June 8, 2010.
Accessed October 7, 2014. http://travel.cnn.com/shanghai/life/957-
million-chinese-students-only-one-things-matters-week-gaokao-
919014.
12. Moore, Malcolm. “Riot after Chinese Teachers Try to Stop Pupils
Cheating.” The Telegraph, June 20, 2013. Accessed December 12,
2013.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10132391/Riot-
after-Chinese-teachers-try-to-stop-pupils-cheating.html.
13. Melcher, Tom. “White Paper No. 4.” Zinch.
http://www.washcouncil.org/documents/pdf/WIEC2011_Fraud-in-
China.pdf.
14. Gallagher, Brendon. “China Disqualifies Marathon ‘Cheats.’” The
Telegraph, January 22, 2010. Accessed December 12, 2013.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/athletics/7051158/China-
disqualifies-marathon-cheats.html.
15. “Exam Questions Remain.” China Daily, September 9, 2014.
Accessed October 7, 2014.
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014–
09/09/content_18563951.htm.
16. Fu, Yiqin. “China’s Unfair College Admissions System.” The
Atlantic, June 19, 2013. Accessed December 12, 2013.
http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/chinas-unfair-
college-admissions-system/276995/.
17. Wing, Kam, and Li Zhang. “The Hukou System and Rural-Urban
Migration in China: Processes and Changes.” China Quarterly 160
(1999): 818–55.
18. Luard, Tim. “China Rethinks Peasant ‘Apartheid.’” BBC News,

39
November 10, 2005. Accessed October 11, 2014.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4424944.stm.
19. Fu, “China’s Unfair College Admissions System.”
20. All-China Women’s Federation Data, 2013.
21. Chuankai. Interview by author, Jinan, March 2013.
22. “” [100 Fake Chinese Universities Warning List]. Shangdaxue,
June 26, 2103. Accessed January 12, 2014.
http://www.sdaxue.com/top/87.html.

40
 Chapter 3
The University
One morning the university cafeteria was abuzz with gossip.
Word was spreading that a student had died and speculation as to
what had happened engulfed campus.
To nobody’s surprise, the school administration was not saying
anything and the deceased boy’s roommates suddenly became
inaccessible. Some departments gathered their students and
cryptically warned them not to spread rumors or speak with anyone
from outside the university about certain events. They did not
specify what those rumors or events might be. Campus suicides
were fairly routine, and similar cover-up measures unfolded every
time, but this case was different. This was a mysterious death that
might be linked to school policy.
In the absence of any official university acknowledgment of the
boy’s death, rumors ran rampant. The story with the most
momentum was that the boy had suffered a brain aneurism in the
middle of the night. When he tried to leave his dorm to go to the
hospital, the doorman stopped him, citing a strict policy that
students had to stay in their rooms during nighttime hours. Unable
to bear the pain any longer, the boy crawled out his window and
tried to climb down the building. On the way down, the story went,
he fell to his death. Another variation said that the boy had simply
fallen on his head while sneaking out to catch a train or play
computer games at an Internet café. In yet another version of
events, the boy had been involved in some sort of physical
altercation just prior to his death.
The security cameras installed all around the building
undoubtedly could have shed light on what actually happened, but
no tapes were ever released. The boy’s roommates returned to the
dorm but would not speak about the incident or their meetings with
school officials.
A few days later, the boy’s parents showed up on campus in
peasant’s clothing. They sat on a sidewalk adjacent to the
administration offices, holding a sign that demanded a full account
of what had happened. Their brief meeting with a school official had
yielded more questions than answers. A few sympathetic students
sat with the parents and expressed remorse but said that their
protest was useless. Still, the parents vainly persisted. “They’ve lost
their only son,” one student told me. “Their life is meaningless now.”
In 2007, I began teaching at this university of roughly thirty
thousand students in the Jiangsu provincial capital of Nanjing. It was
ranked among China’s top fifty colleges and was thus one of the elite

41
schools that received substantial central government funding though
Project 211.
Like state-run institutions at all levels, Chinese universities are
managed in a relatively authoritarian manner compared to their
Western counterparts. The Communist Party, cognizant of how
crucial it is to retain tight control over young students, firmly calls
the shots in higher education. From their teachers all the way up to
the university Communist Party secretary (who holds more power
than the dean or president), students are at the very bottom of a
strict command-and-control structure. As elsewhere in Chinese
society and government, this unchecked power is often abused.
This abuse would become most apparent through my students’
fudaoyuan—an instructor appointed at Chinese universities to
oversee a few hundred students and act as a sort of nanny and
counselor to them. Their responsibilities include advising students
academically and professionally, organizing activities, and enforcing
rules. But their number one responsibility is to “establish a firm
belief in Marxism” and to help students form “a correct view of the
world, life, and values firmly on the road of Socialism with Chinese
Characteristics under the leadership of the Chinese Communist
Party.”[1]
Fudaoyuan wield enormous power over those they monitor. It
was they who were dispatched to warn their students when the
university wanted to keep the campus death quiet. They have the
power to withhold degrees or make a mark on the permanent record
that stays with Chinese graduates throughout their professional
lives. They are often quite popular and helpful to those whom they
oversee, but my students frequently complained about theirs, whom
they nicknamed “the Bitch.”
The fudaoyuan thrived in some of her duties while shirking
others. One of her responsibilities was to regularly organize social
activities and field trips for students, but she chose instead to simply
falsify documents at the end of each semester saying she had done
so (the actual falsification work was usually outsourced to one of her
students). In order to get her to do anything for them—such as
giving permission to live off campus or to travel out of town—several
students said they needed to give her an expensive gift wrapped in
flattery.
One area where the fudaoyuan thrived, though, was in her
Communist Party role, which was the only duty to which her
superiors actually paid attention. She frequently required students to
attend ideological sessions and short film screenings glorifying the
People’s Liberation Army and touting the Party’s latest
pronouncements. On one occasion, some of the fudaoyuan’s Party

42
superiors from outside the university came for a visit. An obligatory
banquet was held, and she chose several of the prettiest girls from
the English Department to entertain and drink liquor with the cadres.
At the end of their senior year, the students were to fill out an
evaluation of all their instructors, including the fudaoyuan. She told
them ahead of time that her scores reflected on them as a
department, so they should put perfect marks all the way down. As
the students completed the forms, she walked around the room,
conspicuously looking over shoulders. Several students, who
happened to be those with whom she had quarreled in the past,
arrived too late to do the evaluation because she had told them the
wrong meeting time.
A student told me about this incident over dinner immediately
after it happened. “Don’t you think you should go to her boss and
tell him all these things?” I asked.
“She has a lot of power over us,” the girl replied. “If someone
complains about her, she’d make their life hell and might stop them
from graduating.”
“Just send a note anonymously, or have a friend in another
department do it for you,” I suggested.
“She’d punish all of us if we did that. It’ll just bring trouble for no
reason. We’ll graduate soon and won’t have to worry about her
anyway.”
“Then why not tell her bosses after graduation? Don’t you want
to see her get fired?”
“Impossible. They’d never fire her. Her job is protected.”
“Well, I think you should do something. If you tell her bosses
they might at least be stricter with her so she’s not so terrible to the
younger students.”
The girl scoffed gently, closed her eyes for a moment, and then
looked at me with a resigned smile, as if I were a naïve child not yet
old enough to understand the world. “There’s just no point,” she
said.
Contrary to this pattern, there was one student whom the
fudaoyuan did not dare cross. His name was Jackson, and he was my
worst student. Despite being an English major, he could barely utter
a coherent word in the language. He was so far inferior to all the
other students as to make one wonder how he had managed to pass
the gaokao.
As it turned out, he hadn’t. Jackson’s father was a famous
professor at the university and his mother had a high position in the
school hospital. By some incredible coincidence, Jackson had been
admitted in spite of his dismal exam performance.
And the coincidences did not stop there. When all the students

43
had to pass a listening comprehension test to move on to their junior
year, Jackson was conspicuously absent, yet he still obtained a
passing score. When it came time to write his final thesis, a teacher
was dispatched to complete it for him; and he was never required to
defend it like everyone else.
At the opposite extreme of the favoritism spectrum, a video that
circulated online showed a graduate student in the university
straddling his sixth-story window and threatening to jump. His
supervisor had been holding his degree ransom, refusing to let him
graduate until he did more research and completed a paper in the
professor’s name. The student felt that the threat of suicide was the
only way to attract attention to his situation and get his rightful
diploma.
When Jackson’s classmates saw the video, they knew exactly
what was happening and were just as quick as I to note the glaring
inconsistency between Jackson’s experience and that of the suicidal
graduate student. But most simply dismissed it as an inescapable
fact of life.

There were many such “facts of life” at the school. Another one
that constantly confronted me was cheating. As a teacher I was
completely intolerant of it at first, giving a failing grade to anyone I
caught. But over time I came to understand the students’ plight
more fully. During their senior year, my students took an English
certification test that is mandatory for English teaching positions.
The certification is very helpful in other job searches as well.
When the scores came out, several decent students had failed
while some of the worst had received the highest scores. I was
quietly informed that many had bought the answer key through a
bathroom stall advertisement beforehand for 3,000 yuan ($480)—a
sum far out of reach for the poorer students. Realizing how these
students would be competing with each other for jobs when
recruiters came to campus the following month, I was furious at the
advantage that the weaker ones had bought themselves.
On a social media account that most of my students followed, I
expressed my disgust at what they had done. The comment caused
a stir in the dorms. Apparently I had breached a taboo: everyone
knew about the cheating, but no one would dare to flag it in such a
public forum. Later that night, though, I got an e-mail from a student
who had failed the test, thanking me for speaking up. “But many
students like me can do nothing but accept the reality and blame
ourselves,” she wrote.
The following year, those who had failed the certification were
allowed to come back and retake the test. I found out that the girl

44
who had written to me—and just about everyone else—saved up and
bought the answers the second time around. I could not blame them.
The cheating was obvious, yet once again the university took no
action.
In contrast to all the rules governing students’ personal lives at
the school, with the option of cheating so readily available, there
tended to be little pressure inside the classrooms. Li Baoyuan, a
professor of labor economics at Beijing Normal University, told me
that this is widespread throughout higher education in China. “No
matter how much attention we pay to this problem, there are still a
lot of students who cheat,” he said. “It’s a sad thing, but more often
students tell teachers that they need to pass for this or that reason,
and they get passed without cheating.”[2]
On several occasions after I had failed students for plagiarizing
or skipping too many classes, I was gently urged by higher-ups to
reconsider, or at least to offer a makeup test. Colleagues at other
schools told me of receiving even heavier-handed rebukes. An
American teacher at a prestigious university in Beijing recalled that
when he failed a student for never coming to class and skipping the
final exam, he was told to simply give her a five-minute makeup test.
“The director basically gave me an ‘either you do it or we will do it’
type answer,” this teacher said. “I was also told to pass on this
information to other teachers with the explanation that it got more
confusing if we failed a student.”
About 54 percent of the students who enter American
universities do not graduate. The attrition rate is 32 percent in the
UK and 11 percent in Japan.[3] China, on the other hand, may have
the world’s lowest college dropout rate. In 2011, the Beijing-based
MyCOS Institute estimated that only 3 percent of China’s university
students drop out. China’s Ministry of Education immediately
disputed that figure as too high, saying the true number was just
0.75 percent.[4]
China’s university system is often called “narrow in, wide out” in
reference to the difficulty of admission and the ease of graduation.
The competitiveness of the gaokao explains much of China’s low
dropout rate. The pressure and extensive financial support coming
from Chinese parents are also factors. But after the years of stress
and tears that precede the gaokao, many students see college as a
four-year hammock to lie back and relax in. This attitude is captured
by a slang Chinese term that roughly sounds like the English word
“university”: you ni wan si nian, meaning to just play around for four
years. It is an attitude that universities tend to accommodate.
Li Baoyuan, the labor economics professor, told me that

45
plagiarism, cheating, and simple neglect of studies are widely
tolerated throughout China’s colleges. On one hand, the universities
will be criticized by parents and shunned by potential students if too
many fail and have to drop out. On the other hand, teachers often
have little interest or incentive to crack down on subpar academic
performance. He compares Chinese universities to state-owned
enterprises of the 1980s, calling them inefficiently controlled
bureaucracies with endemic politicking among teachers. Usually, he
says, professors are more concerned with climbing the ranks and
furthering their own careers than with evaluating their students
properly.
Another problem may be that professors themselves are often
engaged in cheating. Given that international university rankings
rely heavily on output of academic papers, administrations put big
pressure on professors to publish. This, in turn, has resulted in
rampant plagiarism among academics. In a 2010 government survey
of six thousand scientific researchers at six leading Chinese
institutions, more than a third admitted to plagiarism or falsification.
The previous year, Wuhan University estimated that the demand for
academic papers led to a $150 million industry for fake journals and
bogus research.[5] But some professors, like the one whose student
threatened suicide at my university, get these services for free by
exploiting students.
The exploitation sometimes even goes beyond academics. In
2009, a seventy-year-old professor at the Central Conservatory of
Music
—China’s most prestigious music school—accepted sexual favors
and 100,000 yuan from a young woman in exchange for admission
to a PhD program. When he failed to deliver on his promise, she
reported him to the school. For every case that goes public,
countless more go unreported. A young student I knew sought help
from a university administrator to get into graduate school. She
thought the 2,000 yuan ($320) of cigarettes that she brought him
would be enough, but his advances when they met in his office made
it clear that sex would have to be part of the deal. She quickly made
an excuse to leave but did not report him, fearing the potential
backlash.
Yang Rui, a professor of education at Hong Kong University, has
written extensively on corruption in China’s higher education
system. “It’s so deeply rooted,” he told me. “Promotions,
appointment of deanship, university presidents, Party secretaries—
everywhere. I’m quite worried. The political culture in China has
been unprecedentedly corrupt, and this affects almost every corner

46
of Chinese universities in different shapes and forms.”[6]
Yang also said that while requests for sexual favors happen at
universities all over the world, China’s political culture and the
traditionally poor social standing of its women makes the practice
especially prevalent there. “[In Hong Kong] we have clear
regulations,” he said. “If professors [accept sexual favors], that’s
serious stuff. In China it’s not. In theory it is, but in practice it isn’t.”
At five-year intervals, universities undergo inspections from
Ministry of Education authorities as part of the accreditation process,
which also influence their national ranking. It is during these
inspections that serious academic or ethical problems should
theoretically be unearthed. During my first semester teaching, I
dealt with one of these inspections.
In the months leading up to the inspectors’ arrival, drilling and
jackhammers constantly interrupted classes as buildings received
facelifts and vanity structures were erected. In the week immediately
before the inspection, all teachers were told that they needed to
prepare detailed lesson plans for each class for the remainder of the
semester. Meanwhile, all students were assigned hours when they
would be required to study in the library, so as to give the
impression of dedicated learning.
I happened to stop by the reception center as the inspectors
were arriving. Men in suits and young women in leggy qipao dresses
were ready to give a warm welcome as the black Audis synonymous
with government cadres rolled up. Throughout the week, impressive
fountains that I had never seen before were turned on; elevators in
the teaching building suddenly became operational; food in the
cafeteria was unusually delicious and came in supersized portions;
and the dark, secluded corners of campus normally frequented by
couples making out were illuminated by colorful lights.
If the inspectors had ever walked inconspicuously among the
students, they would have readily noticed that something was
strange, as everyone was pointing in awe at all the new and pretty
things. But it is unlikely that they ever got that chance. From what
people in the foreign affairs office reported, it was one banquet after
another, with the actual inspection work being conducted as a formal
entourage that could be seen coming from a mile away.
An American friend who taught at several less prestigious
colleges said that prior to his inspections, teachers would sometimes
spend weeks rehearsing a single lesson with students to perform for
inspectors. Faculty would also spend months adjusting grades and
doctoring past student theses that inspectors might examine. And
accomplished academics from higher-ranking universities were hired
on paper as “visiting scholars” in order to bolster the college’s

47
credentials, even though they never actually set foot on the school
campus.[7]
As soon as the inspectors left my university, everyone breathed
a collective sigh of relief. The fountains and elevators were turned off
and the amorous young couples got their privacy back in once-again
dark corners.
Yang Rui says such inspections are par for the course. Undue
influence, be it simple wining and dining or outright bribes, is very
common. “Cheating is normal for this evaluation,” he said.
Not a single university across the nation lost its accreditation
that year. But remarkably, four schools—including mine—had an
entire department shut down after numerous plagiarized
dissertations were found on file. This was one of many signs that the
government intended to reform Chinese universities in order to boost
their world standing. Some schools were starting to use plagiarism
detection software to root out cheaters. Sang Guoyuan, an associate
professor at Beijing Normal University’s Center for Teacher Education
Research, told me that at his school, students were facing severe
punishments and even expulsion when caught cheating. He says this
trend is starting to take hold firmly at many of the top-tier
universities.[8]
Over the years, the Chinese government has also instituted
corruption crackdowns within universities. In just one province
(Jiangxi), fourteen top university officials, including three university
presidents, fell to corruption charges between 2008 and 2013.[9]
Then in 2010, the vice head of Jilin province’s education department
was sentenced to life in prison for accepting $1.31 million in bribes
in exchange for securing university slots for unqualified students.[10]
Similarly, in late 2013 the head of admissions at Renmin University
fell to corruption charges and was caught trying to flee the country.
[11] While these cases are only scratching the surface of university

corruption, they are raising the public’s awareness of it.

The emergence of microblogging platforms has also given
students greater power to expose misdeeds in their schools. In 2012,
when a female student at Qingdao Qiu Shi College fell to her death
after an evening of drinking with her teachers, the school tried to
suppress any discussion of the incident. The story quickly exploded
on the Internet and reporters discovered that several other
mysterious deaths had occurred previously at the school. Though
what had happened never fully came to light, the teachers involved
were dismissed from their posts.[12] Then in 2014, photos of a young
woman in bed with a Xiamen University history professor were
posted online by a blogger claiming to be a former student who had

48
been coerced into a sexual relationship with him. Several other
alleged students then spoke up to detail similar stories, and soon
after the professor was removed.[13]
As part of its effort to “comprehensively deepen reforms,” the
Communist Party Central Committee announced in late 2013 its
intention to overhaul the country’s education system by granting
schools more autonomy, closing the rural–urban education gap,
adding more emphasis on practical vocational education, and
shaking up the university admissions system in order to accept a
more diverse range of students.[14] China has also been welcoming
cooperative relationships between dozens of Western universities in
order to help internationalize the country’s higher-education
standards. Schools like New York University and the University of
Nottingham have even been allowed to set up satellite campuses in
China.
However, the area perhaps in greatest need of reform is still
changing very little, and it may even be retrogressing. Despite the
claim to be giving more autonomy to universities, the Communist
Party has no intention of backing away from them. Currently the
Party directly appoints top university officials, including the all-
powerful Party secretary and school president. According to Professor
Yang Rui, these leaders are often referred to as “parachutes” for the
way they are simply dropped into universities.[15] “It’s just chess,”
Yang said. “They move you to the next step.” He explained that
since leadership roles at prestigious universities can be springboards
to powerful ministerial positions, higher-level Party officials
frequently stack the positions with their political allies. “We often say
‘Chinese Communist Party,’” as if the organization were monolithic,
Yang noted. “But what is the Communist Party? These people fight
against each other in different factions, and unfortunately,
universities aren’t immune from this. In fact, they’re directly
involved.”
Because of this system, university leaders are far less concerned
with the people below them (their teachers and students) than with
pleasing the handful of Communist Party cadres above them. “In
China, very few deans care about their students or teachers,” Yang
observed.
This heavy Communist Party influence trickles all the way down
to the classroom. In addition to frequent political activities arranged
by university fudaoyuan, Chinese college students are also subject
to a slew of compulsory courses on subjects like Marxism, morality,
and modern Chinese history that are meant to highlight the
superiority of the Chinese system and the triumphs of the

49
Communist Party.[16] Western philosophies are mentioned only in
passing, for the purpose of highlighting their inferiority when
compared to Socialism with Chinese Characteristics—a euphemism
for China’s brand of authoritarian capitalism. While emphasizing the
advantages of one’s own political system is normal throughout the
world, the education in China’s universities goes quite a bit further
by teaching students to have the “correct opinion.”
China’s National Entrance Examination for Postgraduates (NEEP),
which all students must take to get into graduate school, gives an
idea of the subject matter contained in the undergraduate courses
on Chinese ideology. One question from the 2011 test asks students
to choose which of the following accurately describes China’s current
political system:

1. The Communist Party’s great creation of combining Marxism

and China’s reality
2. The Communist Party’s achievement of leading Chinese
people through a long struggle
3. A reflection of the common interests and aspirations of all
ethnic groups in China
4. The inevitable choice in the social development of modern
China[17]

(All choices are correct.)

Another question from the same exam starts with this
statement: “In 1989, former U.S. State Department advisor Francis
Fukuyama dished out the so-called ‘End of History’ theory which says
the Western democratic system is ‘the end of human progress in
social formation.’ However, 20 years of history have shown us that
history didn’t end. What ended was the Western sense of
superiority.”
My students often complained about the tedium of these classes,
indicating that everyone—including the teachers—knew the content
was little more than dogmatic propaganda. Professors seldom tried
to convince students that the subject matter was true, but simply
taught them how to approach the material so that they could pass
their graduate school political tests. One student recalled a teacher
instructing the class that “if Lenin said it, it must be the right
answer.”
I received a frank explanation of the training’s purpose from
Professor Wang Ji, who holds a PhD in Marxism from Peking
University and teaches the political subject matter at a Beijing test-
prep academy. “The goal of this education is to let students achieve

50
the same opinion,” he said. “It’s common that students don’t
necessarily agree, but we’ve achieved the goal when students take
the test and know they need to choose according to what they
learned instead of their own mind.”[18]
To my surprise, many students who hated the political classes
nevertheless supported their inclusion in higher education. “We are
unconsciously learning to support the Party,” Maggie, one of my
post-80s undergraduate students, once told me. “But as huge and
complicated as China is, it’s hard for it to apply a two-party or
multiparty system. Thus, this method the Party uses to maintain its
domination is necessary to ensure the whole country’s safety and
stability.”
Most of my younger post-90s students remained unconvinced of
the political education’s merits, but they tended to just laugh when I
brought it up, treating it as yet another of those inescapable facts of
life. “Most young people know which direction the tests try to take
them,” Donnie Wang, a student from Chongqing, told me. “But it
does no good to be a maverick. We just want to pass so we can have
a fighting chance to travel further or study abroad and know what’s
really going on.”
Professor Wang Ji admitted that this political education does not
have nearly the effect that it had even a decade earlier. “It may not
be the most effective way to educate students,” he said, “but it
cannot be neglected, cannot be omitted.”
Despite the many reforms that the government has proposed, it
signaled in early 2012 its intention to intensify its ideological hold on
universities. One year before Xi Jinping assumed the presidency of
China, he called on universities to “increase thought control” over
students and young lecturers. “University Communist Party organs
must adopt firmer and stronger measures to maintain harmony and
stability in universities,” he said at a meeting attended by university
leaders in Beijing. “Young teachers have many interactions with
students and cast significant [political and moral] influence on
them.”[19]
Within months of assuming the presidency in the summer of
2013, Xi’s sentiment would be formalized in the notorious
“Document 9.” This communiqué, circulated by the Communist
Party’s General Office to local Party committees, admonished cadres
to stop universities and media from discussing seven taboo topics:
constitutional democracy, universal values, civil society,
neoliberalism, crony capitalism, press freedom, and historical
Communist Party mistakes.[20]
The wording of the document in many ways echoed remarks by

51
former president Jiang Zemin twenty-four years earlier. At an
education conference one month after the Tiananmen Square
crackdown, Jiang lamented that Western values had taken hold
among many of China’s youth, and he called for greater ideological
control on university campuses.[21]
Both periods—from 1989 into the early 1990s, and from summer
2013 onward—were times of great paranoia for the Communist Party.
On both occasions China’s government responded by trying to
rejuvenate an ailing economy with sweeping market adjustments,
accompanied by a political clampdown to help in seeing the risky
economic reforms through.
During the early 1990s, the stricter ideological controls of which
Jiang spoke were indeed implemented in schools. Then, as today,
few swallowed the rigid touting of Marxist socialism. However, some
of the more nationalistic and troubling aspects of the indoctrination
would be taken to heart, with violent repercussions years later.
1. “: 24” [Fudaoyuan in Colleges and Universities: Ministry of
Education Order No. 24]. The Ministry of Education of China, 2006.
Accessed October 8, 2014.
http://www.moe.edu.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/moe_621/201001/8184
2. Li, Baoyuan. E-mail interview by author, March 2013.
3. “How Many Students Get a Tertiary Education?” In Education at a
Glance 2010: OECD Indicators (OECD, 2010), 72.
4. “Government Refutes Reports of High College Dropout Rate.”
Xinhua, October 22, 2011. Accessed December 16, 2013.
http://english.people.com.cn/202936/7623669.html.
5. Qiu, Jane. “Publish or Perish in China.” Nature 463 (2010): 142–43.
6. Yang, Rui. Interview by author, Hong Kong, November 2013. For
further reading see Yang, Rui. “Corruption in China’s Higher
Education System: A Malignant Tumour.” International Higher
Education 39 (2005): 18–20.
7. “Chinese Education Evaluators Are Passing Failing Schools.”
Seeing Red in China (blog), April 7, 2011. Accessed October 7, 2014.
http://seeingredinchina.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/chinese-
education-evaluators-are-passing-failing-schools/.
8. Sang, Guoyuan. E-mail interview by author, March 2013.
9. Shen, Nianzu. “‘’” [‘Downfall’ College Presidents Who Fell
During Construction]. Economic Observer, June 1, 2013. Accessed
December 16, 2013.
http://www.eeo.com.cn/2013/0601/244833.shtml.
10. “Tarnished Halls.” Global Times, December 5, 2013. Accessed
December 16, 2013.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/830189.shtml.
11. “Tarnished Halls.”

52
12. “Qingdao Teacher Fired after Inebriated Student Falls to Her
Death.” eChinacities, November 23, 2012. Accessed December 16,
2013. http://www.echinacities.com/news/Qingdao-Teacher-Fired-After-
Inebriated-Student-Falls-to-Her-Death?cmteditid=.
13. Sun, Li, and Meidong Hu. “Behavior beyond Classes.” China
Daily, July 29, 2014. Accessed August 20, 2014.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/2014–07/29/content_17945686.htm.
14. “China to Promote Equality in Education.” Xinhua, November 15,
2013. Accessed December 16, 2013.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013–
11/15/c_132892157.htm.
15. Yang, Rui. Interview by author. For further reading see Xia, Jin,
and Bin Feng. “Analysis of the Reasons and Countermeasures for
Academic Corruption.” Chinese Education and Society 40, no. 6
(2007): 95–105.
16. Ministry of Education Group. [Morality and the Basis of Law],
6th ed. Higher Education Press, 2013.
17. “2010 ” [2010 Political Exam Multiple Choice Questions and
Answers]. kaoyan.hjenglish.com, January 1, 2010. Accessed
November 8, 2013. http://kaoyan.hjenglish.com/detail/93558/.
18. Wang, Ji. Interview by author, Beijing, August 2011.
19. Simpson, Peter. “China’s Vice President Orders More Thought
Control over Students.” The Telegraph, January 5, 2012. Accessed
December 16, 2013.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8995123/Chinas-
vice-president-orders-more-thought-control-over-students.html.
20. “Document 9: A China File Translation.” China File, November 8,
2013. Accessed December 16, 2013.
http://www.chinafile.com/document-9-chinafile-translation.
21. Holley, David. “China Acts to Curb West’s Influence: Regime
Seeks Controls on Universities, Foreign Media.” New York Times, July
16, 1989. Accessed December 16, 2013.
http://articles.latimes.com/1989–07–16/news/mn-5937_1_foreign-
media.

53
 Chapter 4
The Patriots
To many, Rao Jin represents the ultimate Chinese success story.
His first brush with fame came at age eighteen when he shocked
his village by getting into the country’s most prestigious university.
By twenty-one, he would become a campus sensation after
cofounding “China’s Facebook” and buying his very own car and
chauffeur. But by twenty-three, he would be the poster child for
China’s “fenqing” (angry youth) movement and would find himself at
the center of a nationalistic fervor.
In March 2008, a group of Buddhist monks gathered in the
Tibetan capital of Lhasa to commemorate a failed 1959 uprising
against the Chinese government. When police came to break up the
gathering, it was the final straw for many locals who had long
resented Communist Party rule and the presence of Han Chinese in
the region.[1]
Following the police action, enraged local Tibetans began
indiscriminately attacking Han Chinese and members of the minority
Hui Muslim ethnic group. Government vehicles were destroyed and
businesses belonging to Han and Hui owners were set ablaze. By the
following day, police had suppressed the rioting with gunfire and tear
gas.[2]
According to government figures, rioters killed 22 people,
including an eight-month-old baby. Tibetan exile groups in India
claimed that the total death toll was 140, mostly Tibetans killed by
police quelling the riot.[3]
The government was quick to blame the “Dalai Lama clique” for
covertly sparking the violence with the support of unspecified
“Western anti-China forces.” It was a familiar narrative to Chinese
that some “Westerners” were about to make more believable.
During and after the riots, foreign journalists were barred from
entering Lhasa, leaving much of the reporting to secondhand
information from activist groups. As is often the case in such
situations, several of the initial reports contained inaccuracies.[4]
Several foreign media outlets mislabeled old photos of police
crackdowns in Nepal and India as Chinese police violence against
Tibetans. Photos showing Chinese police rescuing bystanders from
rioters were also incorrectly described as protesters being arrested.
[5]
The outlet that drew the greatest ire was CNN. In fact, just days
after the riots the website anti-CNN.com sprang up with the aim of
“identifying the lies and distortions of facts from the Western

54
media.”[6] CNN’s chief transgression was a photo it published of a
military vehicle in Lhasa being pelted with rocks by protesters. The
photo, anti-CNN.com claimed, had been purposely cropped to hide
the rock-chucking Tibetans in an attempt to downplay their
aggression and demonize the Chinese military. According to the
website, the Western media was twisting facts in order to defame
China. Ironically, the image as it appeared on anti-CNN.com did its
own cropping, deleting CNN’s original caption under the photo,
which read, “Tibetans throw stones at army vehicles on a street in
the capital Lhasa.”[7]
Patriotic young Chinese posted messages on anti-CNN.com
decrying Western hypocrisy. While many users kept the focus on
correcting purported media distortions, others used the platform to
vent xenophobic hatred of the West and grievances dating back to
the nineteenth century.
Over the following weeks, fuel would be thrown on the fire as the
torch relay for the Beijing Olympics began. What was supposed to be
a festive coming-out party for China quickly became an
embarrassment as protesters in San Francisco, London, and Paris
turned out in force to decry Chinese actions in Tibet and various
other human rights violations. At one point when the torch passed
through Paris, a torchbearer in a wheelchair was assaulted by French
protesters attempting to extinguish the flame.[8]
While outsiders may have seen the protests as the acts of a few
brazen individuals against the Chinese government, many within
China saw it as a unified slap in the face of every Chinese citizen. It
was a signal that “the West” could not tolerate an emerging China
and would do anything to keep it down, just as it had done in the
past.
By mid-April the initial wave of nationalism had become a full-
blown tsunami. Soon after the Olympic torch relay incident in Paris,
activists in China organized a boycott of the French superstore
Carrefour and protests at outlets across the country. Thousands
chanted slogans like “Oppose Tibet independence,” “Go China,” and
“Condemn CNN.”[9] When I asked students participating in the
protests why they were targeting Carrefour, some cited
unsubstantiated rumors that it had funded the Dalai Lama. For
others, the store’s French origin was sufficient justification.
Around this time a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student from
Shanghai, who would later work for anti-CNN.com, created a six-
minute video entitled “China, Stand Up!” Set to a chilling orchestral
piece, it juxtaposed false Western media reports beside an image of
Joseph Goebbels. “Finally, we’re reminded of Chairman Mao’s famous

55
words: imperialism will never abandon its intention to destroy us,”
the video stated. “Obviously, there is a cabal, a Cold War against
China!” it said while showing an image of George W. Bush and the
Dalai Lama superimposed on a Nazi flag. “Stand up! We must stand
up to give our voice to the world!”[10]
The video was frightening to foreigners living in China, but it was
a hit among Chinese, drawing more than a million views within a
week and a half and tens of thousands of approving comments. A
few students e-mailed the link to me. I was not quite sure if they did
so out of courtesy or spite.
As these events unfolded, many outside China assumed that
they were part of a coordinated government effort to stoke
nationalism and redirect attention from Tibet’s ethnic conflicts. At a
Foreign Affairs Ministry press conference, a foreign reporter even
asked if the government was funding anti-CNN.com. “You won’t ask
that if you take a look at the reports by the Western media,” the
spokesperson replied. “It is these irresponsible and unethical reports
that infuriated our people to voice voluntarily their condemnation
and criticism.”[11]
While a flood of state-backed editorials egged on the
nationalistic sentiment, they were just fanning flames that had
spontaneously erupted among China’s “angry youth”—so labelled for
their intense patriotism and fury at perceived slights by foreign
countries.[12] The flames would not die down until an earthquake in
Sichuan killed over eighty thousand people and redirected the
nation’s attention. But the flames continued to smolder, just waiting
to reignite.

When I met Rao Jin at a Beijing café nearly five years after the
Lhasa riots, it was hard to believe he had been the man behind anti-
CNN.com. With his laid-back demeanor and constant grin, he
appeared nothing like the vitriolic nationalists associated with his
website. Rao seemed to agree. “I’m not very outgoing, so I didn’t
want to be famous,” he laughed. “Anti-CNN was a coincidence. I’m a
Libra, so I’m not really interested in politics.”[13]
Rao was born in 1984 in an agrarian village of two hundred in
the coastal province of Fujian. From a very young age, he was ahead
of the curve. He did not want to go to kindergarten because he felt it
was “too naïve” (besides which the classroom sat beside a smelly
latrine), so he skipped straight to first grade.
He says his interest in media began at age fourteen when he
started picking up radio signals from Taiwan that included the BBC,
Voice of America, and Radio Free Asia. Sometimes he even picked up

56
programs from the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which is banned
in China as an “antigovernment cult.” After having been exposed
only to state-run propaganda his whole life, this was a fascinating
turn of events.
“During that time I was very curious and felt quite excited,” Rao
said. “They’re different from any Chinese media. They describe
China as a hell, no light, no freedom at all, but in fact it’s too
political. I saw two extremes, so I learned critical thinking and
balance.”
Like most Chinese parents, Rao’s mother and father saw a good
education as the only path to success. They put gaining admission to
a good university above all else and constantly locked him in his
room to study. He would not disappoint them. When he took the
gaokao college entrance exam at the end of high school, he
achieved something considered miraculous in his small village: he
earned admission to Tsinghua University, China’s most prestigious
school. The achievement made him a local celebrity. “That was a
burden,” he said. “I didn’t want people to know me. The gaokao
[score] was just a coincidence.”
Rao had always stood head and shoulders above his classmates,
but when he arrived at Tsinghua that all changed. “I found after one
semester that even if I studied very hard, I wasn’t a top student
anymore,” Rao said. “I was shocked and really depressed. I wanted
to be different and do something that people never imagined.”
After his first semester, he stopped putting so much effort into
his coursework and turned to something else new to him that
Tsinghua offered: Internet access. He had never gone online before
college, but once he did, he would hardly ever log off again.
Rao dove into computer programming and would eventually buy
his own servers to host the sites he was designing. Soon older
Tsinghua alumni were tracking him down for help in building their
company websites. One site that he helped to develop from his dorm
room was Xiaonei, one of China’s first social networks, which started
out as a carbon copy of Facebook (right down to the logo). After
about a year, Rao and the other cofounders cashed out by selling the
company to an entrepreneur. As of 2013, under the name Renren, it
remained one of China’s largest social networks, with 31 million
active users and a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. By his
junior year at Tsinghua, these successes had enabled Rao to stand
out among his peers; in fact, he had his own car and chauffeur.
However, Rao’s father was mortified, thinking that this IT
obsession was uncharted territory. Rao was doing well now, but who
knew how long this career path could last? It would be better if he
directed his intelligence toward something guaranteed to provide for

57
a lifetime. Rao’s father expected him to study hard and become a
civil servant—a highly competitive occupation viewed as lucrative
and stable in China.
“My father came all the way to Beijing to ask the class
supervisor to persuade me to take the civil service exam,” Rao said.
“But the supervisor told him that I would choose my own way. My
father felt very unhappy.”
In a sort of compromise, Rao agreed to sell his car and buy an
apartment—a much better investment in his father’s eyes. Soon
afterward, however, Rao would tread further into risky ground.
After the Lhasa riots began in 2008, Rao, like many of his highly
educated and patriotic friends, was greatly disturbed by how some
foreign media were portraying events unfolding in China. In
response, he set up anti-CNN.com, choosing the provocative name
intentionally in order to be noticed both in China and abroad (in 2009
he changed the name to April Media). The strategy clearly worked;
tens of thousands of Chinese flocked to the site to support Rao’s
cause.
“There were indeed many people [coming to the site] who
weren’t so calm,” Rao recalled. “But many overseas Chinese
students and our forum members were quite calm and understood
what they were doing. They just wanted to win back respect for their
country.”
Rao says that from the beginning he respected Western
journalists and their devotion to their work, and that he wanted only
to oppose the prejudice exhibited by some Western media. I asked
whether he thought his website had stoked counterproductive
nationalism, even if that was not his intention.
“Nationalism or patriotism, I don’t know how to define it in
Western culture,” he replied. “In this generation we accept a lot of
Western culture, like Hollywood movies. As a result many Western
media didn’t understand why, this time, Chinese youth reacted so
nationalistically. I can understand. We just wanted justice, to be
treated equally. We don’t want to be discriminated against.”

This insistence on respect from the rest of the world is
something for which Rao’s generation, which came of age after the
crackdown at Tiananmen, has become known. In the early twentieth
century, China’s Kuomintang government had often emphasized a
Chinese nationalist narrative that centered on its exceptional people
as victims to pugnacious foreign aggressors. But when Mao and his
Communists came to power in 1949, the national story was shifted
from one of victimhood to one of socialist triumph and proletarian
internationalism. In a socialist China, there was no room for

58
“bourgeois nationalism,” which Marxists view as something conjured
up by rulers to keep workers of the world divided and distracted from
class struggle.
After Mao was gone and China had begun to embrace capitalism,
the Communist Party continued throughout the 1980s to rely on
socialist ideology as its source of legitimacy. But the demonstrations
of 1989 showed that this track was bunk. The Party needed a new
approach . . . or perhaps more accurately, a very old approach.
Five days after the Tiananmen protests were quelled, then-
paramount leader Deng Xiaoping addressed a group of generals who
had been involved. “During the last ten years our biggest mistake
was made in the field of education,” he told them. “Primarily in
ideological and political education—not just of students but of the
people in general. We didn’t tell them enough about the need for
hard struggle, about what China was like in the old days and what
kind of a country it was to become.”[14]
Within two years, China would launch its “Patriotic Education
campaign,” shifting away from a focus on the triumphs of socialism
back toward highlighting China’s historical traumas. The “old days”
to which Deng referred would be codified into official history as the
“Century of Humiliation,” which extended from the Opium War in
1839 through World War II, ending with Communist “liberation” in
1949.[15]
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, China’s Qing
dynasty leaders still regarded their country as the center of the
universe and one to which all other nations should pay tribute.
Throughout history, China had indeed been among the world’s most
formidable powers both technologically and militarily. But Qing
leaders did not realize that, while maintaining China’s isolation from
the rest of the world, they were missing out on the industrial
revolution unfolding in Europe.
In 1839 a Qing commissioner wrote to England’s Queen Victoria,
requesting that she demonstrate her “politeness and
submissiveness” toward China by ending the opium trade.[16] It
came as a shock that, rather than complying, the British used their
superior weaponry to decimate China’s much larger standing army.
After that, other Western powers would carve up the country,
inflicting “humiliating” treaties that required China to pay
outrageous indemnities and cede territory. The ultimate humiliation
came when the tiny nation of Japan defeated China in 1895 and
invaded again in the 1930s, leaving behind a trail of destruction,
rape, torture, and senseless murder.
Patriotic Education was introduced in 1991 and fully instituted by

59
1994.[17] Henceforth, Chinese schoolchildren would be bombarded
with instruction on the Century of Humiliation in gory detail. China,
according to the curriculum, was an exceptional, peace-loving
civilization that was brought to its knees by foreign imperialists. Only
when the Communist Party vanquished the Japanese army and took
control of the country in 1949 did China begin to recover its former
glory.
This education has fairly successfully unified the Chinese against
external enemies and shifted public demands from calls for reform to
an insistence on national sovereignty and stability. But it has also
had the side effect of embedding a severe inferiority complex among
the Chinese, along with a need for validation and respect from the
West.
The 2008 Olympics were supposed to signify China’s
reemergence as a serious player on the world stage. But when
China’s youth saw the global media heaping insults rather than
praise on their country, they felt that the West was once again
seeking to impose its imperialistic will on China. The fact that the
conflict was over Tibet especially opened old wounds.
In the end, the 2008 uproar against the West featured little more
than angry rhetoric. But when that smoldering nationalism reignited
four years later, things became downright violent. This time the
conflict involved a series of skirmishes on the Diaoyu Islands, an
uninhabited island chain claimed by both China and Japan.
In April 2012 the nationalistic mayor of Tokyo announced his
intention to raise money to buy some of the islands from their
private Japanese owners, place them under Tokyo’s administration,
and develop them. In a bid to prevent this action and reduce the risk
of provoking China, Japan’s national government said it would buy
the islands and bar any visits or development.[18] However, Chinese
did not view this alternative any more favorably; they still saw a
hated foreign power once again divvying up Chinese territory.
These events alone may not have caused the Chinese to take up
arms, but on August 15 the Japanese coast guard intercepted and
detained a group of Hong Kong activists landing on Diaoyu.[19] By
the time the Japanese government finalized its purchase of the
Diaoyu Islands in September, Chinese tempers had flared and the
government was ready to harness that anger to send a message.
On September 13, the state-run Global Times newspaper ran an
editorial saying, “Japan inflicted the deepest atrocities on China in its
modern history, which was full of humiliation. If China were to pick a
target country to wash out the old shame, Japan is the best
choice.”[20]

60
 That weekend, thousands poured into the streets in dozens of
cities to protest. In Beijing, protesters descended upon the Japanese
embassy, pelting it with water bottles, eggs, and rocks while hoisting
Chinese flags and portraits of Mao Zedong.

Protestors march against Japan in front of the Japanese embassy in Beijing in

September 2012 with a sign reading “Eliminate Japanese, protect our
country.”
(Photo: Eric Fish)
Across the nation, businesses that appeared to be Japanese were
targeted, even though most of them had Chinese owners. Japanese
restaurants had windows smashed, retailers’ shops were ransacked,
and a few companies such as Panasonic and Toyota had their offices
torched. Japanese cars in several cities were set ablaze, overturned,
or otherwise vandalized.[21]
In a particularly gruesome incident, a fifty-one-year-old Chinese
man was dragged out of his Toyota in Xi’an and left paralyzed after a
twenty-one-year-old migrant construction worker named Cai Yang
bludgeoned him on the head with a bicycle lock. Days later, when
Cai learned that he was wanted by police for his assault, he
expressed surprise. He told family members that his action was
“patriotic” and that “online, half the people support me and half are
against me.”[22]
The Japan-based Asahi Shimbun newspaper caught up with Cai’s
mother weeks later, after he had been arrested. “Ever since he was
a child, he loved to watch movies and dramas about the war against
Japan,” she told them. “Those programs often emphasize brutal
scenes of murder and pillage by Japanese troops. In Nanyang village,
whenever children are asked who the villain was, they would always

61
answer, ‘The Japanese.’”[23]

Protestors set a Honda dealership ablaze amid the 2012 anti-Japan

demonstrations.
(Photo: Weibo)
Based on interviews with his family and friends, a profile in
Southern Weekend painted a picture of Cai that was not quite as
simple as a young man being brainwashed into antiforeign
sentiment.[24] He had grown up in a poor and troubled rural family
and dropped out of school at age thirteen. From there, he went
straight into construction work and by age eighteen had migrated to
Xi’an to do plastering on buildings. He toiled through unfulfilling work
and rarely socialized with other workers, opting instead to immerse
himself in online first-person shooter games during his off-time. He
dreamed of going to university and making something of his life, but
by this point, it was an impossible proposition.
On Cai’s QQ microblog more than a year before his attack in
Xi’an, he wrote, “In two weeks I’ll be 20-years-old . . . sigh . . . will I
be the same next year as I am now? Really want to find a wife to live
with. Don’t want to go on being a slacker. God, grant me a wife!”[25]
Cai saw himself at the bottom of society—unnoticed and
irrelevant to all those around him. The Southern Weekend profile
described a time when he had urinated on his project manager’s
Audi, and “felt great” about it. “He wanted to do more,” the profile
said. “To prove ‘I am important’—but lacked both the material and
mental means. A clamoring protest gave him the ‘opportunity’ to do
precisely this.”
Two weeks after the bludgeoning incident and just before his
arrest, Cai posted his last blog message: “Miserable post-90
generation—do we feel fortunate?”

Within two days of Cai’s attack in Xi’an, the government decided
that the protests had gotten out of hand. The media started urging
calm and police dispersed the large gatherings. The abrupt ending
gave the impression that China’s leaders had skillfully manipulated
the protests and then simply turned them off after achieving their

62
desired aim.
But it would be a mistake to assume that either the 2008 or
2012 protests were the result of a brainwashed populace sheepishly
falling in line behind the government, or that China’s “angry youth”
are all just uneducated flag wavers.
To Rao Jin, the most laughable part about his whole experience in
2008 was the idea, frequently assumed by foreign media, that he
and anti-CNN.com were in league with the government. On the
contrary, on several occasions Rao had been “invited for tea”—a
euphemism for a soft interrogation by public security officials. “When
I do media, I want to criticize the government as well,” Rao said.
“Otherwise I would follow my father’s advice and take the civil
service exam. But that’s totally impossible. I like freedom.”
Even among the more vitriolic or violent nationalists, there is not
always as much overlap with the government agenda as outsiders
might think. For example, the Mao Zedong posters prominently
displayed during the anti-Japanese protests, widely assumed to be a
sign of support for the Communist Party, were actually an indictment
of the current government. When I asked a few protesters in front of
the Japanese embassy why they were carrying the Mao Zedong
posters, the consensus answer was that “Chairman Mao would never
let Japan get away with this.” At one of the anti-Japan protests in
Shenzhen in 2012, some protesters even unfurled a banner that read
“Liberty, democracy, human rights and a constitution.” They were
quickly arrested by plain-clothes police.[26]
Off-message displays like this represent one of the Communist
Party’s deepest fears. On many occasions over the past century,
nationalistic antiforeign protests in China have quickly shifted toward
blaming corrupt domestic leaders for taking a soft line on the
foreigners. From there, the protests have the potential to morph into
calls for greater government accountability and even democracy.
The May 4th Movement in 1919 began after Japan was awarded
Chinese territory in the post–World War I Treaty of Versailles, which
prompted Chinese to condemn their own leaders for standing by too
idly. In 1935, protests against Japanese militarism again turned
toward domestic leaders for their failure to resist invasion. Then in
1985, demonstrations against Japan that were suppressed gradually
turned to condemnations of Chinese leaders for selling out their
country and lacking patriotism. They eventually shifted to full-blown
movements for political reform that would set the stage for the 1989
Tiananmen protests.
Jessica Chen Weiss, an assistant professor of political science at
Yale and author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s
Foreign Relations, argues that over the past three decades, China’s

63
government has selectively allowed or repressed nationalist protests
in order to achieve certain diplomatic aims. In 2012, Chinese leaders
wanted to signal resolve when Japan refused to back down, so it
tacitly allowed street demonstrations to grow. But more often, the
government suppresses these movements before they become
large, as it did two years earlier over another flare-up in the Diaoyu
Islands dispute.[27] “When nationalist protests are raging in the
streets, it’s very difficult for the Chinese government to make
compromises and wind those protests down without looking
unpatriotic,” Weiss told me. “But at the same time, the Chinese
government is often quite selective in determining when those
protests take place at all.”[28]
One common belief holds that the Chinese government simply
turns nationalist protests on and off periodically as a way to let
citizens “blow off steam” and redirect anger over domestic issues
toward foreign enemies. Weiss cautions that this is an oversimplistic
view. “The government does play a role in allowing these
demonstrations to spill forth into the streets,” she says, “but often
they aren’t encouraging them, and even when they are encouraging
them, it’s more a process of stage-managing grassroots expression
of anger and trying to mitigate the risk that these turn against the
government.”
Some have argued that these nationalistic outbursts are not so
much a result of patriotism as they are a manifestation of much
deeper societal dissatisfaction. A book by TV host and international
affairs commentator Qiu Zhenhai recounts a conversation with a taxi
driver about the possibility that China might go to war. “War is good,
it reshuffles the cards,” the driver told Qiu. “If I lose my life, I lose my
life. I’m not like those people who own property or companies. I’m
even less like the corrupt officials who have riches they can steal. I
am a proletarian, with nothing to care about. These days I don’t see
any hope; it’s better to just take a gamble.”[29]
Andrew Chubb, a University of Western Australia scholar who
researches Chinese nationalism and public opinion, suggested that
stories like this reflect not necessarily a genuine longing to reclaim
lost territory and avenge national humiliation but “a desire for
something, anything, to shake Chinese society up.”[30]
Chubb told me that nationalistic outbursts like those of 2008 and
2012 have various motivations, including outright racism, the
novelty of protest, a sense of connection with others, and a feeling of
patriotic duty. But an additional, often-overlooked motivation is a
desire to vent general dissatisfaction with life. “I’m a believer in the
theory that antiforeign nationalism expresses domestic social issues

64
of exclusion and atomization,” Chubb said.[31]
This is the government’s nationalism dilemma: The Communist
Party is sometimes described as standing over a flame with a can of
gas in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other. It must allow
enough expression of nationalism that people do not begin looking
enviously at Western democracies or viewing Chinese leaders as
weak and unpatriotic, but not so much that the disenfranchised
redirect nationalistic fervor toward domestic issues or push the
government toward an unwanted conflict.
I asked Rao Jin if he thought war could actually break out
between China and Japan or a Western country. “I hope not,” he
replied. “But it’s possible. People don’t like wars, but China’s
population structure is quite dangerous. There are a lot of problems.”
As he explained, China is burdened by having too many people and
too few resources. “God bless America,” he laughed. “I’ve been
there. I envy you—you have so much land and no strong neighbors,
so you don’t need to worry about regional political issues.”
Rao pointed out that the world would be unsustainable if
everyone copied the consumption practices of Americans, and in any
case, China’s dearth of resources precludes it. He said this situation
makes it more difficult to keep the Chinese people happy, so he
sympathizes with China’s leaders to some degree. “I don’t think
[ours] is the best system, but maybe it’s not the worst,” he said. “If
we moved 300 million Chinese to the US, the US system wouldn’t
work.”
As the double-digit growth that China has enjoyed for the last
two decades inevitably slows, it will become even harder to keep the
nation’s young people happy if their expectations grow faster than
opportunities. The once wide-open paths to success are getting
clogged as more people fight over fewer openings. Rao admits that
he probably would not have been so successful had he been born
just a little bit later.
“Ten or twenty years ago, if you were smart enough, you could
have many opportunities for success,” he said. “But now there are a
lot of people as smart as you and lot of people with a better
connected father than you.”
1. Fairclough, Gordon. “Chinese Dismayed by Tales of Tibet
Violence.” Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2008. Accessed July 14,
2014. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB120638214966859837?
mod=tff_main_tff_top.
2. Miles, James. Interview by CNN. “Transcript: James Miles Interview
on Tibet.” CNN, March 20, 2008.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/03/20/tibet.miles.interview/
3. “Timeline of Tibetan Protests in China.” CNN, January 31, 2012.

65
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/31/world/asia/tibet-protests-timeline/.
4. Zhang, Yiqian. “Correspondent Calling.” Global Times, December
13, 2012. Accessed October 13, 2014.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/750063.shtml.
5. Ye, Jun. “Lhasa Riot Reports Show Media Bias in West.” China
Daily, March 22, 2008. Accessed October 13, 2014.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008–
03/22/content_6557738.htm.
6. Xu, Nengyu. “‘’” [An ‘April Youth’ Passion for Wealth and
Public Goods]. China Youth Daily, May 10, 2010. Accessed October
13, 2014. http://zqb.cyol.com/content/2010–
05/10/content_3221681.htm.
7. “CNN Statement on Tibet Coverage.” CNN, March 28, 2008.
Accessed September 14, 2013.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/03/28/tibet.statement/.
8. Graham-Harrison, Emma. “Disabled Torch Bearer Becomes
Chinese Hero.” ABC News, April 11, 2008. Accessed October 13,
2014. http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=4634434.
9. Branigan, Tania. “Chinese Nationalists Hit at Carrefour over Tibet.”
The Guardian, April 20, 2008. Accessed September 14, 2013.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/21/china.france.
10. Tang, Jie. “2008! China Stand Up! 2008, !” Recorded April
17, 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSTYhYkASsA.
11. “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Qin Gang’s Regular Press
Conference on March 27, 2008.” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the
People’s Republic of China, March 28, 2008. Accessed September 14,
2013. http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xwfw/s2510/2511/t419160.htm.
12. Yang, Lijun, and Yongnian Zheng. “Fen Qings (Angry Youth) in
Contemporary China.” Journal of Contemporary China 21, no. 76
(2012): 637–53.
13. Rao, Jin. Interview by author, Beijing, March 2013.
14. Deng, Xiaoping. “Address to Officers at the Rank of General and
above in Command of the Troops Enforcing Martial Law in Beijing.”
June 9, 1989. Accessed September 14, 2013.
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/dengxp/vol3/text/c1990.html.
15. Wang, Zheng. Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical
Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012, 99.
16. Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation, 48.
17. Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation, 101.
18. Shao, Xiaoyi, and David Stanway. “China Dismisses Japan Plan to
Buy Disputed Islands.” Reuters, July 8, 2012.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/08/us-china-japan-islands-
idUSBRE86701A20120708.

66
19. Smith, Sheila. “Why Japan, South Korea, and China Are So Riled
Up over a Few Tiny Islands.” The Atlantic, August 16, 2012. Accessed
October 13, 2014.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/why-japan-
south-korea-and-china-are-so-riled-up-over-a-few-tiny-
islands/261224/.
20. “Confrontation Will Be Huge Mistake for Japan.” Global Times,
September 13, 2012. Accessed September 14, 2013.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/732890.shtml.
21. “China Struggles to Curb Anger as Protesters Denounce Japan.”
Reuters, September 16, 2012. Accessed October 13, 2014.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/16/china-japan-
idUSL3E8KG02T20120916?type=marketsNews.
22. Chen, Ming. “” [Surviving Fragments of Cai Yang the Car
Smasher]. Southern Weekend, October 11, 2012. Accessed August
18, 2014. http://www.infzm.com/content/81726.
23. Okudera, Atsushi. “Mother Says Arrested Chinese Protester
Influenced by Anti-Japanese Dramas.” Asahi Shimbun, October 24,
2012. Accessed September 14, 2013.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/asia/china/AJ201210240070.
24. Chen, “Surviving Fragments.”
25. Chen, “Surviving Fragments.”
26. Lam, Oiwan. “China: Protesters Arrested for Human Rights
Banner at Anti-Japan Rally.” Global Voices, September 17, 2012.
Accessed September 14, 2013.
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/09/17/china-protesters-arrested-
for-carrying-wrong-banner-at-anti-japan-rally/.
27. Weiss, Jessica Chen. Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in
China’s Foreign Relations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
28. Weiss, Jessica Chen. Telephone interview by author, September
2014. For further reading see Weiss, Powerful Patriots.
29. Qiu, Zhenhai. “” [The Need for Breakthrough Reform over the
Next Three Years]. Southern Weekend, October 11, 2012. Accessed
October 13, 2014. http://www.infzm.com/content/99587.
30. Chubb, Andrew. “‘War Is Good, It Reshuffles the Cards’: Qiu
Zhenhai’s Taxi Ride.” Southseaconversations, April 20, 2014.
Accessed May 14, 2014.
http://southseaconversations.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/war-is-
good-it-reshuffles-the-cards-qiu-zhenhais-taxi-ride/.
31. Chubb, Andrew. E-mail interview by author, May 2014. For
further reading see Chubb, Andrew. “Chinese Public Opinion on
Maritime Territorial Issues: Attention, Context, Government
Performance, Policy, Confidence, Certainty and National Identity.”
Perth USAsia Centre, 2014.

67
 II
Going to Work

68
 Chapter 5
Factory Town
On the night of May 14, 2010, a twenty-one-year-old migrant
worker from Anhui province slashed his wrists and leaped to his
death from the seventh story of his Shenzhen factory dorm.
Such an incident would normally fade away unnoticed. But this
suicide happened at Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics
manufacturer that makes Apple’s iPhones and iPads. Text messages
and social media quickly spread the word throughout the 400,000-
worker factory. Soon media outlets were reporting that it was the
seventh suicide of the year at Foxconn. By the end of 2010 there
would be fourteen, all involving workers under twenty-eight years
old.
Despite having worked at the plant for six months, the man’s
seven roommates had hardly known him. “Working at Foxconn is
pretty busy,” one of them told Xinhua News Agency. “Chats are
rare.”[1]
The Foxconn suicides of 2010 made international headlines and
hit close to home for millions around the world using Apple products
(and anything made in China). They also got extensive coverage
domestically, causing national introspection. They vividly depicted
the conditions that young Chinese had been taught to avoid at all
costs through getting an education.
After the sixth suicide, the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend
newspaper sent twenty-year-old intern reporter Liu Zhiyi undercover
to get a job at the Shenzhen factory for twenty-eight days. “It wasn’t
about finding out what they died for,” Liu later wrote. “But rather, to
learn how they lived.”[2]
A more careful investigation showed that reality was a bit more
complex than the prevailing narrative. Foxconn had roughly one
million employees in mainland China at the time, leaving its fourteen
deaths well below the national suicide rate and even that of most
developed Western countries (for instance, the US state of Montana,
also with a population of about one million, saw 227 suicides that
same year[3]). A Tsinghua University psychologist invited to the
Shenzhen factory concluded that Foxconn’s suicide rate was
statistically similar to the rate among Chinese university students of
the same age.[4]
Liu Zhiyi emerged from his time at Foxconn with a different
though equally compelling story. “This super factory that holds some
400,000 people isn’t the ‘sweatshop’ that most would imagine,” he
wrote in Southern Weekend. “Compared to others, the facilities here

69
are well-equipped and superior, with employee treatment meeting
standard specifications. Thousands of people flock here each day
just to find a place of their own, in search of a dream that they will
probably never realize.”[5]

Shenzhen’s strategic location at the mouth of the Pearl River and
adjacent to Hong Kong allowed it to be designated China’s first
Special Economic Zone in 1980. Thanks to this experiment with
market capitalism, the city exploded from a fishing village of thirty
thousand to a metropolis of nearly ten million.[6] Following
Shenzhen’s lead, the entire Pearl River delta region has grown from a
series of farming villages to nine major cities with 64 million people
and a GDP that surpassed Taiwan’s in 2006. By the end of 2012,
nearly 20 percent of China’s 263 million migrants were working
there.[7]
The region has come to be known as “the world’s workshop.”
China’s economic miracle began here, drawing millions off the farms
on which their families had lived for generations to delve into a
brave new world.
For that first generation of workers in the 1980s and 1990s,
factory conditions tended to resemble the Dickensian excesses of an
unrestrained industrial revolution. These excesses came to a head in
1993 at Shenzhen’s Zhili doll factory. In order to prevent workers
from stealing goods and wandering away during working hours, the
owners bolted the building’s doors, barred the windows, and blocked
passageways with crates. When a fire broke out, there was no
escape. After the smoke cleared, eighty-seven workers—all migrant
women from poor inland provinces—lay dead in heaps next to the
locked exits.
During the subsequent factory investigation, a researcher
discovered a box of undelivered letters containing correspondence
between Zhili employees, their families, and other migrant workers
in the region. The letters shed new light on the lives and worries of
the era’s workers.[8]
The primary concerns were not getting enough overtime and not
getting wages. Paychecks generally came late if at all, and many
workers appeared clueless as to how much money they were
supposed to be receiving. Discussions about going to work at a
different factory was common, but this could be very difficult, as
bosses held months of back pay and confiscated workers’
identification cards as leverage. If unable to show ID when stopped
by Shenzhen police, migrants could be arbitrarily arrested and given
a crippling fine.

70
 Secondary concerns were loneliness and isolation. Few workers
or their families had access to phones, leaving the sketchy postal
system as the only means of communication. Workers also
complained of frequent health problems and, on occasion, dangerous
working conditions. “There was toxic gas in the factory,” one letter
read. “Yuxia [a coworker] died a horrible death.”[9]
Inadequate food was yet another concern. But perhaps the most
striking thing from the letters is what they did not contain. Not a
single one mentioned a worker complaining to a boss or to
authorities. Except for instances of clear and present danger,
working conditions went unmentioned as well. The workers appeared
to have very modest aspirations, primarily for a regular income. Only
when they could not get paid consistently did they tend to think
about leaving the factory.
Workers at that time were scarcely in a position to complain.
They were highly replaceable, easily silenced, and not prone to
complain anyway. Having toiled endlessly in the fields for a
subsistence existence, they knew things could be worse. Their
meager earnings and repressive working conditions still presented
better prospects than what they had had back home.
Today, the Pearl River delta has its second generation of workers,
many of them the children of migrants. Some things have changed.
Some have not.

When Liu Zhiyi showed up at Foxconn’s behemoth Longhua,
Shenzhen, plant in 2010, he was directed to wait in line with
thousands of other prospective workers. Even in the year following
the suicide incidents, Foxconn reported that eight thousand
jobseekers showed up each day to compete for the four thousand
daily openings.[10]
The lines were chaotic and noisy, prompting a manager to yell
that the quietest would be employed first. Liu waited more than six
hours and was eventually hired. After a health check the next
morning, he was assigned to move goods in the storage department.
His dorm room had ten beds and more space than he had expected.
“The quality wasn’t bad—no worse than my [Tsinghua] university
dormitory,” Liu later told me. “It also provided hot water twenty-four
hours a day, so it’s actually better than the university.”[11]
He would never really get to know his roommates. Most worked
twelve-hour days and shifts continued around the clock. Even if they
happened to be in the room at the same time, workers did little
other than sleep there. Many lived together for months without
learning each other’s names.

71
 Liu felt fortunate with the job assigned to him. It was not too
busy, so he had time to explore the factory and mingle with others.
But for ordinary workers, the job would have been a disappointment.
One of the greatest criticisms of Foxconn, and of Chinese factories in
general, is the ungodly work hours, often seventy to eighty per week
—but most of the workers want this. Since they have traveled so far
to make money, to them days spent not working are days wasted.

Southern Weekend reporter Liu Zhiyi.

(Photo: Liu Zhiyi)
Employees signed a “voluntary overtime affidavit” to waive the
thirty-six-hour legal limit on monthly overtime (which still left
Foxconn in violation of the rarely enforced overtime law). “This isn’t
a bad thing, though,” Liu wrote. “Many workers think only factories
that offer more overtime are good factories. For the workers
desperate for making money, overtime is like a pain that can
breathe. Without it, the days without money make them
suffocate.”[12]
Workers would actually leverage their relationships with
superiors in order to get more overtime hours. Holidays were
especially contentious periods, since they brought triple the normal
hourly pay. “May 1st [China’s Labor Day] festival is a concern for
some, because it’s hard to toil through the days when you spend
money without making any,” Liu wrote. “That day, workers would
rather not celebrate any festival, and wish for more overtime

72
pay.”[13]
The factory’s conditions did not appear likely to drive workers to
suicide, but they did have a psychological impact, which Liu found
not so much repressive as tedious and unfulfilling. “I felt I had
entered a system,” Liu said. “It can provide what I need for my body.
They have a gym, a swimming pool, an exercise room—all of that.
The only thing they don’t provide is time.”
Eighty-five percent of Foxconn’s workers were under age thirty,
and departments tended to be heavily skewed toward one gender or
the other.[14] Liu recalled that while working in the storage
department he could go an entire day without seeing a woman. In
their limited time off, men would go to bars or skating rinks around
the factory to meet girls. “If you have a girlfriend, then your life can
be colorful,” Liu said. “If work is the disease, then finding a girlfriend
is the pill that can cure it.” Other common activities for men included
going to Internet cafés to view pornography or visiting one of the
area’s many brothels.
Fights broke out easily over girls and other minor issues. “The
workers have a very limited life,” Liu said. “It’s only work, and the
work is of no interest. They have some emotions they want to
release.”
The squabbles were not just between individuals. Workers came
from all over the country, leading to culture gaps and prejudice
between those from different regions. So people gravitated toward
those from the same background and stuck closely together.
Sometimes these groups even came to resemble gangs. Mix days of
tedium with the heightened testosterone of young girl-hungry males
in roving packs, and the results could get ugly.
In 2012 a fight broke out at Foxconn’s 79,000-worker Taiyuan
plant in northern China, reportedly between groups from Shandong
and Henan following a drunken quarrel between two young men.
Accounts varied, but things apparently spiraled out of control when
factory guards overzealously started beating up brawlers, prompting
some two thousand workers to get involved in a rampage through
the factory. Paramilitary police were called in to quell the violence,
forty people were injured, and the plant was shut down for a day.[15]
Female factory employees are less likely to get into brawls, but
they face their own problems. In a 2013 survey of female workers in
Guangzhou, 70 percent reported having experienced sexual
harassment from coworkers, about one in five had quit a factory job
in order to escape the problem, and 9 percent said they had been
asked for sex outright by a colleague or superior.[16]
In the end, Liu Zhiyi felt that Foxconn was distinctive only

73
because of its size. After his reports appeared in Southern Weekend,
workers from around the Pearl River delta sent him e-mails like “If
you come to Dongguan, you’ll think Foxconn is heaven.” Indeed,
unlike many companies, Foxconn never shortchanged employees or
paid their wages late. It offered a stable environment and provided
for all its employees’ physical needs. But like most factories, it did
not provide one key thing that this generation had come to crave: a
sense of direction.
“I wouldn’t say the people were happy or miserable,” Liu said.
“In their ordinary life they just felt puzzled. I think the most
astonishing thing for me is how puzzled they were about the future.”
Whenever Liu asked workers what their goal in life was, they
would say almost the same thing: to make money and get rich. But
their explanations of how they would get from where they were to
where they wanted to be were evasive. “They often dream, but also
repeatedly tear apart their dreams, like a miserable painter who
keeps tearing up his drafts,” Liu wrote in his article. “They
manufacture the world’s top electronic products, yet gather their
own fortune at the slowest possible pace.”[17]

In autumn 2013 I met a worker named Liu Peng at his dormitory
in a small electronics factory within Shenzhen’s Longhua industrial
district. The rooms were concrete shells, each with eight bunk beds.
Some had broken windows and all had crisscrossing clotheslines,
creating a jungle of hanging T-shirts and underwear. Liu Peng
emerged from his room wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, Adidas
sneakers, and a big grin on his face.
We went to lunch at the Chairman Mao Restaurant, where he
was anxious to talk about factory life as he puffed on his cigarettes,
though he had as many questions for me as I did for him. “How
much do American workers make? Do Americans also hate Japan?
Did you vote for Obama?”[18]
Liu Peng had come from Hubei province six years earlier when
he was eighteen, having never harbored any illusions of going to
college. His parents were poor rice farmers and he was a weak
student. He shunned a high school that would have put him on the
gaokao track in favor of attending a technical institution teaching
machine electronics.
When he graduated, the decision to go to Shenzhen was not a
hard one. In the 1980s and 1990s, leaving for migrant work was
seen as brave and dangerous, but by now nearly all the young
people in his hometown were doing it. They were going primarily for
the higher salaries, but also for lifestyle reasons. Liu wanted to

74
branch out to a place where he could become more knowledgeable
and sophisticated. “In fact, I still don’t know what I want to learn,” he
said. “I’m too young. I just want to work in a big city for survival and
learn something through my work.”
In six years, he had worked in four factories—a common
situation for workers in the region. His first job was producing hot
plates at a plant with a few dozen workers. He sat on the assembly
line for a year, but quit because the boss frequently delayed
payments.
His second factory was Foxconn, where he worked for two years.
“Foxconn life is pretty good,” he said. “Work is simple, but you just
do the same thing every day. After work, you sleep, then wake up
and work again. It’s a point-to-point life.” Ultimately he left for a
smaller factory. “Work in Foxconn was stable and you get a good
salary, but I wanted to learn more,” he said. “In a small factory you
can learn different jobs and there are more opportunities. You can
work up to salesman.”
In all his jobs Liu usually worked twelve-hour days, six days per
week. In his free time he would read books about Chinese history
and sometimes drink beer and sing karaoke with friends.
At his fourth and current factory, which had about thirty workers,
he had finally gotten his chance to move up the ladder. That was the
reason for his grin: he had just been promoted to a sales position,
which meant a nicer dorm room and a higher salary. After numerous
horizontal steps in Shenzhen, he felt this was his first real step up.
Contrary to the prevailing trend among the first generation of
migrant workers, Liu had no intention of ever moving back to his
rural hometown. His ultimate goal was to save enough money to
start his own factory in Shenzhen. But when he spoke of his dream, it
seemed abstract if not impossible. He seemed well aware of the
financial and political hurdles that would stand in his way. “China is a
guanxi (relationship-based) country,” he explained. “If you want to
do a project but another factory has a relationship with the
government, they’ll succeed, even if your product is good and theirs
isn’t.”
Moreover, his income, although rising, would be hard pressed to
keep up with the responsibility to care for his parents and the cost of
housing. “I’d spend my whole life saving to buy a house,” he said.
These are two of the most common concerns for young Chinese.
Liu Peng’s parents, being poor farmers, cannot count on living off a
pension when they age. Any medical problems that arise could be a
financial catastrophe for Liu Peng and his younger brother, also a
migrant worker. Even if their parents stay healthy, the two children
will be expected to provide almost entirely for them when they

75
retire. Having a sibling lightens the burden, but most do not have
this luxury, given the family planning restrictions that were
especially strict (though unevenly enforced) in the 1980s and early
1990s.
Housing is an even more overwhelming concern, as, when I
spoke with Liu Peng, runaway speculation had left China with some
of the highest real-estate costs in the world. Buying even a small
family-sized apartment outside the Shenzhen city center would cost
him twenty-seven years’ worth of his factory wages at 2013 prices.
Given these two factors, climbing the ladder to the point of
financial security would be extremely difficult, and reaching the point
where he could open his own factory would take little short of a
miracle—a fact he seemed to recognize. “Many post-70s people who
came to Shenzhen are bosses now,” he said. “But now there’s so
much competition—every day a new factory.”

Later I would meet another worker in Longhua named Huan
Cheng, a twenty-three-year-old son of Sichuan brick sellers who had
become migrant workers themselves in the early 1990s. Like Liu
Peng, Huan had come to the city at age eighteen after skipping the
gaokao altogether. But he had slightly more modest dreams, hoping
only to save enough money to start a small business back home and
“improve himself” in the process.[19] Contrary to popular belief,
money is not the only reason why young Chinese travel so far from
home to work on assembly lines. According to one study, 60 percent
of young rural migrants reported personal development as a “very
important” reason for migrating.[20]
Unlike most of the workers I met in Longhua, Huan did not work
on weekends. He cherished his free time, which he used to play
basketball, practice tai chi, and read books. His favorite book was
Dale Carnegie’s 1936 self-help bestseller How to Win Friends and
Influence People, a popular title among workers in the area.
Huan even had time for dating. He said the best day he had ever
had since coming to Shenzhen was when his first girlfriend accepted
him. But the romance, like most things in Shenzhen, was fleeting.
She was from another province and her family would not allow her to
marry Huan. He would later date another girl he met in a factory, but
they gradually lost touch when she left for another job.
Everyone was always on the move in Shenzhen, and long-term
relationships, whether romantic or platonic, were hard to maintain.
Though technology had made communication cheap and instant,
loneliness and isolation persisted.
Huan himself had already been through four factories in his five

76
years. At the first one, which produced labels for drink bottles, the
machines were too hot and Huan believed that the chemicals in the
air were hurting him. “The salary was paid on time,” Huan said, “but
the boss cared only about profit, not about improving the workers’
environment even with simple things like an air conditioner.”
Giving up a reliable income without having lined up a new job is
something that Huan’s parents never would have considered two
decades earlier when they came to Guangdong. But the market has
changed dramatically, giving workers much more leverage. “It’s not
hard to find a job now,” Huan said. “The key is finding a good job.”
Two factors were driving this market change: Shenzhen’s rapid
development and the dwindling labor pool. In my time in China, I had
been through many gritty industrial wastelands; Longhua was not
one of them. The streets looked like those of any other developed
Chinese city, with shopping malls, Western fast-food restaurants, and
large electronics markets with neon lights dotting the building fronts.
If not for the occasional groups of young women locking arms in
matching factory uniforms, one might not even guess that it was an
industrial hub.
As Shenzhen developed, factories started competing with the
service industry for the workers flocking to neighboring restaurants,
shops, hotels, karaoke bars, and massage parlors. By 2012, the
situation was even more competitive, as China’s labor pool started
to shrink for the first time ever. The population of working-age
people between fifteen and fifty-nine fell by 3.45 million that year,
and this trend is expected to continue until at least 2030 as the Mao-
era baby boomers retire and the smaller one-child generation takes
over the workforce.[21]
At his first factory in 2008, Huan Cheng was paid 800 yuan
($127) per month. When I spoke with him in 2013, he was making
around 3,000 yuan ($480). This 275 percent wage increase in five
years was common among workers in Longhua. Liu Peng’s wages
had risen 380 percent over six years. But these raises have not
always come easily. Workers have often had to fight to improve their
circumstances—
something they have been increasingly willing to do.[22]
Though wages have risen dramatically, so have costs. Workers
complain that as soon as a factory starts paying its workers more,
surrounding food and clothing shops immediately raise their prices.
In 2010 and 2011 China’s inflation rate spun out of control, peaking
at 6.5 percent. To make matters worse, factories started cutting
corners because of reduced orders amid European and North
American economic woes.

77
 Not coincidentally, these two years were also a banner period for
labor unrest in China. One of the most high-profile incidents began at
a Honda plant in Foshan, a manufacturing city of five million people
across the river from Shenzhen. In summer 2010, a twenty-three-
year-old worker fed up with price increases outpacing his wages
pressed the emergency stop button on his assembly line and yelled,
“Let’s go on strike.” He and the other workers, with whom he had
conspired in advance, joined him, demanding that their pay be
nearly doubled.
The Chinese media widely reported the story, and workers at
another Honda factory a hundred miles away joined the strike, also
demanding the right to elect their own union leaders. Forming
independent unions remained illegal in China, and the officially
approved
organizations were usually more loyal to bosses than workers. After a
two-week standoff involving negotiations with the Foshan
government, the dispute was settled when Honda agreed to increase
wages by 24 to 32 percent—although the protest leader and his
main accomplice were fired for “sabotage.”[23]
The Honda strike was unusual in that it attracted extensive
media coverage in China (likely because it targeted a Japanese
company), but similar strikes were occurring across the country at
the same time. While economic factors played a major role, the
shifting mindset of young laborers and the new tools at their disposal
were also significant contributing factors. The country had seen
worse periods of belt-
tightening and runaway inflation, but workers had rarely reacted so
boldly en masse.
Better education and various new means of spreading
information are making workers more aware of their rights and more
empowered to communicate with each other. Liu Peng recalled that
while he was at Foxconn during the suicide controversy of 2010,
word of each new death spread quickly among the workers though
text messages and social media. Workers also went online and were
amazed to discover that their factory was getting so much
international media attention. In fact, one study attributed an
abnormal spike in Foxconn suicides in May 2010 to the Werther
effect, according to which publicity inspires copycats.[24]
Two years later, workers at another Foxconn plant in Wuhan
would even leverage the attention from the suicide controversy to
improve their working conditions. After a new assembly line was
hastily set up under dangerous conditions without proper training,
150 employees stood on the factory roof threatening to jump. “It was

78
not about the money but because we felt we had no options,” one
worker told The Telegraph.[25]
Professor Anita Chan of the China Research Center at the
University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, believes that incidents
like these do reflect growing awareness of rights by workers. “But it’s
still very low,” she told me. “I have yet to see Chinese migrant
workers really coming out in an organized way.”[26]
Chan pointed out that the government has been consistently
raising the minimum wage due to concern for social stability. It also
often steps in to broker solutions when labor unrest gets out of
control. “[The intervention] is good enough to ward off big
upheavals,” she said. “Of course they are worried, but I think the
biggest protests don’t come from workers.”

In spite of great improvements, many problems remain in
China’s
factories. Stories constantly emerge of bosses cheating employees,
exposing them to dangerous working conditions, employing
underage workers, abusing subordinates physically or sexually, and
firing (with impunity) those seeking redress. In difficult economic
times, workers may show up one day only to find that their boss has
fled with months of their back pay. The more distant a factory is from
the scrutiny of major cities and honest labor law enforcement, the
worse these issues become.
Still, few factory workers today would deny that they are better
off now than a few years earlier. Almost none of them yearn for the
world their parents lived in.
As I ate with Liu Peng at the Chairman Mao Restaurant, I asked if
he thought he had a fair chance to succeed in modern China. “No,
no!” he said in English, laughing. “There’s no fairness in the world.”
Nevertheless, he expects that things will be fairer after China goes
through a period of growing pains. “I’m satisfied with the direction of
my life,” he said. “And mostly satisfied with the direction China is
going. The government is very corrupt, but every country has this
problem. It’s moving step by step.”
In early 2013, some analysts said that China (or at least the
Pearl River delta) had begun to enter the all-important “Lewis turning
point.” This is a critical time for developing countries, when worker
wages begin to rise faster than the rate of inflation because the
surplus labor pool has been exhausted. Until that point, employers
can still attract new workers from rural areas without raising wages.
[27]
In Shenzhen and the rest of the Pearl River delta, this turning
point means that factories are being forced to offer higher wages,

79
better working conditions, and a better overall quality of life. These
rising costs have sent companies like Foxconn farther inland in
search of cheaper untapped labor. The arrival of these large
manufacturers in central regions is allowing migrant workers to live
closer to home and find well-paying alternatives to farm work or the
harsh factories that previously dominated these areas. In 2011 the
populations of several Pearl River delta cities including Shenzhen,
Guangzhou, and Dongguan declined for the first time in three
decades.[28]
The International Monetary Fund predicts that between 2020 and
2025, China as a whole will reach the Lewis turning point and rural
wages will approach parity with those of urban areas. This transition
presents a mixed blessing for China and the government that tries to
manage this massive nation. On one hand, much of the working
class will continue to see its quality of life improve, while its growing
disposable income creates a new consumer base. On the other hand,
rural migrants will come to more fully resemble their urban
neighbors and will begin making similar demands for rights that
have traditionally been denied to them.
In 2013, the case of Shenzhen worker Wu Guijun appeared to be
a sign of growing government intolerance of labor movements. Wu
was elected as an intermediary between his fellow workers and the
bosses of his furniture factory after the company decided to relocate
without paying employees the legally mandated compensation.
Ultimately, discontent spiraled into a two-hundred-person
demonstration outside a district government office, for which—
despite coworkers’ testimony to the contrary—Wu was blamed. He
was threatened with three years in prison for “gathering a crowd and
disrupting public order”—a catchall charge frequently used to
suppress dissidents. Under pressure from Wu’s supporters, judicial
authorities ultimately dropped the charges after Wu had already
spent one year in detention.
China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong–based worker rights group,
documented nearly 1,200 strikes in China between summer 2011
and the end of 2013. And in contrast to the conciliatory approach
that authorities had tended to take in prior years, the group saw a
“noticeable increase” in police interventions in the second half of
2013. Forty percent of the protests were reportedly in manufacturing
industries hit especially hard by the global economic downturn.[29]
The following year, the group noted a 180 percent increase in worker
protests between 2012 and 2014.[30]
This could be a preview of things to come as China’s economic
growth continues to slow and rising wages push manufacturers

80
inland and overseas. In the process, factories will close and bosses
will likely continue trying to shortchange increasingly bold workers,
heightening the level of labor unrest. If its economy is to keep
steaming ahead, China must transition from its heavy reliance on
cheap labor to a more innovation-driven economy.
To have any hope of achieving this goal, China’s young educated
class will have to create new industries and make its increasingly
expensive workers more efficient through technological
development. It does not bode well that, rather than creating new
industries that add value to China’s economy, many of these
educated young people are instead finding themselves on assembly
lines along with their uneducated peers.
1. Chung, Olivia. “Foxconn Suicide Toll Mounts.” Asia Times, May 22,
2010. Accessed January 14, 2014.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/LE22Cb01.html.
2. Liu, Zhiyi. “——28” [Youth and Fate Accompanied by Machines—
Notes from 28 Days Undercover at Foxconn]. Southern Weekend,
May 25, 2010. Accessed October 11, 2014.
http://www.infzm.com/content/44881.
3. Uken, Cindy. “High Country Crisis.” Billings Gazette, November 25,
2012. Accessed January 14, 2014.
http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-
regional/montana/montana-s-suicide-rate-leads-the-
nation/article_b7b6f110–3e5c-5425-b7f6–792cc666008d.html.
4. Fan, Fumin. Interview by Qian Dong. “1+1:’’” [CCTV
‘News 1+1’ Mystery of Seven Foxconn Jumpers]. CCTV, May 12,
2010. http://view.news.qq.com/a/20100513/000001.htm.
5. Liu, “Youth and Fate.”
6. Zhang, Moran. “China’s Urbanization Pace to Slow, So Will
Growth.” International Business Times, February 27, 2014. Accessed
March 19, 2014. http://www.ibtimes.com/chinas-urbanization-pace-
slow-so-will-growth-1558120.
7. Yao, Kevin. “China’s Migrant Worker Pay Growth Nearly Halved in
2012.” Reuters, May 27, 2013. Accessed January 14, 2014.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013–05–27/business/sns-rt-us-
china-economy-migrantsbre94q03a-20130526_1_migrant-workers-
national-bureau-shanxi.
8. Chan, Anita. “The Culture of Survival: Lives of Migrant Workers
through the Prism of Private Letters.” In Perry Link, Richard Madsen,
and Paul Pickowicz, eds., Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a
Globalizing Society. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, 163–
88.
9. Chan, “The Culture of Survival.”
10. “White Collar Workers Lose Out as Factory Wages Rise in the

81
Pearl River Delta.” China Labor Bulletin, March 9, 2011. Accessed
October 7, 2014. http://www.clb.org.hk/en/content/white-collar-
workers-lose-out-factory-wages-rise-pearl-river-delta-0.
11. Liu, Zhiyi. Interview by author, Beijing, October 2012.
12. Liu, “Youth and Fate.”
13. Liu, “Youth and Fate.”
14. Chan, Jenny, Pun Ngai, and Mark Seldon. “The Politics of Global
Production: Apple, Foxconn and China’s New Working Class.” New
Technology, Work and Employment 28, no. 2 (2013): 104.
15. Wan, William. “Foxconn Riot in China Seen as Likely to Recur.”
Washington Post, September 26, 2012. Accessed January 14, 2014.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/foxconn-riot-in-
china-unlikely-to-be-the-last-experts-say/2012/09/25/1e6828b8–
071c-11e2-afff-d6c7f20a83bf_story.html.
16. Sunflower Women Workers Centre. “The Sexual Harassment of
Women Factory Workers in Guangzhou.” November 25, 2013.
Accessed January 14, 2014.
http://www.clb.org.hk/en/sites/default/files/Image/research_report/sexual
harassment survey sunflower centre.pdf.
17. Liu, “Youth and Fate.”
18. Liu, Peng. Interview by author, Shenzhen, November 2013.
19. Huan, Cheng. Interview by author, Shenzhen, November 2013.
20. Chiang, Yilin, Emily Hannum, and Grace Kao. “It’s Not Just about
the Money: Motivations for Youth Migration in Rural China.” Asia-
Pacific Education, Language Minorities and Migration Network
Working Paper Series: 20.
21. Anderlini, Jamil. “Chinese Labour Pool Begins to Drain.” Financial
Times, January 18, 2013. Accessed January 14, 2014.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ad1e00e6–6149–11e2–957e-
00144feab49a.html?siteedition=intl.
22. Ngai, Pun, and Huilin Lu. “Unfinished Proletarianization: Self,
Anger, and Class Action among the Second Generation of Peasant-
Workers in Present-Day China.” Modern China 36, no. 5 (2010): 493–
519.
23. Barboza, David. “In China, Unlikely Labor Leader Just Wanted
Middle-Class Life.” New York Times, June 13, 2010. Accessed January
14, 2014.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/business/global/14honda.html?
pagewanted=all&gwh=DD8C13B15F71965960FF251580828907&gwt=pay
24. Cheng, Qijin, Feng Chen, and Paul Yip. “The Foxconn Suicides and
Their Media Prominence: Is the Werther Effect Applicable in China?”
BMC Public Health (2011). http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471–
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25. Moore, Malcolm. “‘Mass Suicide Protest at Apple Manufacturer

82
Foxconn Factory.” The Telegraph, January 11, 2012. Accessed January
14, 2014.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9006988/Mass-
suicide-protest-at-Apple-manufacturer-Foxconn-factory.html.
26. Chan, Anita. Telephone interview by author, January 2014. For
further reading see Chan, Anita. “Die Internationale
Gewerkschaftsbewegung, Arbeitskonflikte und Aussichten auf
Tarifverhandlungen in China” [The Trade Union Movement, China’s
Labour Protests and Prospects for Collective Bargaining]. In
Arbeitskampfe in China [Labour Conflicts in China]. Vienna: Promedia
Druck- Verlagsgesellschaft, 2013.
27. Lau, Kevin, and Stephen Green. “China’s Rising Wages in Quest
for Rural Workers Reach a Critical Milestone.” The Nation, May 29,
2013. Accessed January 14, 2014.
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/business/Chinas-rising-wages-in-
quest-for-rural-workers-rea-30207052.html.
28. “Floating Population Records Decrease.” Global Times, April 23,
2012. Accessed January 14, 2014.
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90778/7795378.html.
29. China Labor Bulletin. “Searching for the Union: The Workers’
Movement in China 2011–13.” February 20, 2014. Accessed February
21, 2014. http://www.clb.org.hk/en/content/searching-union-
workers%E2%80%99-movement-china-2011-13-0.
30. Boehler, Patrick. “Q&A: Strikes Peak in China with New
Generation of Interconnected Blue-Collar Workers.” South China
Morning Post, August 13, 2014. Accessed August 20, 2014.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1572050/qa-strikes-
peak-china-new-generation-interconnected-blue-collar.

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 Chapter 6
The Ants
Outside Workers Auditorium in central Beijing, group after group
of dejected recent college graduates shuffled out from the job fair
inside.
It was August 2013, more than two months after this cohort had
finished school, and their already dismal prospects had just become
even grimmer. Most had been hitting these fairs since spring. Some
had graduated the previous year but were still jobless.
Two young men from neighboring Hebei province who had
studied in Beijing said they were nearing the end of their rope.
“We’ve been looking for six months, but there aren’t any good jobs,”
one of them said. “My family is starting to get really worried.”
Across the country, there were nearly seven million new college
graduates—at the time, the most ever in Chinese history—but 15
percent fewer open jobs than the previous year. When school ended,
only one-third of these graduates had secured a position.[1] Chinese
media dubbed it the toughest job-hunting season ever.
By August, applicants were nibbling for scraps. Nobody walking
out reported having seen any booths that interested them. Most
participating employers were real-estate companies offering low-
level sales positions of dubious potential to anyone willing to work on
commission.
It was the worst year to date for Chinese college grads (until the
record was broken again the following year), but the market had
been bleak for a long time. For years, China’s universities had been
pumping out students with few skills that interested recruiters.
A few weeks after the job fair, I met a twenty-five-year-old man
named Liu Geng who had confronted the same situation four years
earlier. I met him in the sprawling Tiantongyuan low-income housing
complex in North Beijing while he was eating at a cheap noodle
restaurant. The community’s tightly packed high-rises held nearly a
million residents. Liu had smoothly combed hair, small glasses, and
spoke very slowly and deliberately. He dreamed of one day
becoming a novelist.
He had graduated with excellent marks from a second-tier
university in his home province of Hubei, with a degree in Chinese.
Like most young college graduates, he figured that would be enough
to get him a decent white-collar job. But when he started sending
résumés in his college town of Wuhan, he quickly learned that little
was available. “I was really surprised it was so hard to get a job,” he
said. “In university, you get no concept of what society is really

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like.”[2]
Liu went to Beijing where his older sister was working, thinking
that there must be better prospects in the nation’s capital. He hit the
job fair circuit, looked online, and sent résumés to hundreds of
companies. “I had no specific goal,” he said. “I just applied for any
job.”
Despite all that effort, he found only the usual scraps, settling for
a string of sales jobs at real-estate and insurance companies. “Those
businesses recruit almost anyone,” he recalled, shaking his head.
“They have incentives to get as many recruits as possible. I handed
out fliers to sell homes, but nobody trusts those people. I worked on
commission and basically got no income.”
Liu spent more money than he could earn, borrowing heavily
from his sister and parents. Eventually he gave up on Beijing and
returned to Hubei to move boxes in a medicine factory. “That kind of
job . . . ,” he sighed wistfully. “It takes you only a few days to realize
that you’re worthless, basically just a machine.”
Over the next three years, he hopped across the country chasing
leads for respectable white-collar jobs but always fell into something
far below his hopes. He put in time at factories in Guangzhou and a
grocery store in Tianjin, rarely staying at any job for more than a few
months.
Though his hometown was usually hundreds of miles away, it
was hard to keep secrets from his old neighbors. His rural village of
about a thousand thrived on gossip, and everyone knew of Liu’s
plight. “Some people used me as an example showing it’s useless to
study,” he said. “They would say, ‘Look, he went to college, but so
what? He can’t even get a job.’”
Liu’s success on the gaokao had been a major source of pride for
his family, especially since so many others in the village had failed.
But now, families of those who had bypassed college for the labor
force were quietly reveling in Liu’s failure, subtly raising the topic
with his parents. For Liu, his family’s loss of face was the worst part
of all.
Millions across China were feeling the same pressure. By 2012,
Chinese under twenty-five with a college degree had a 16 percent
unemployment rate, twice that in the United States. For those with
only a high school education, the unemployment rate was 8 percent,
and for persons with just an elementary education it was 4 percent.
[3] The perverse implication was that, in China, to improve your job

prospects you needed to have less education.

This paradox can be traced back to a hasty decision in 1999,
when China was still reeling from the Asian financial crisis. Workers

85
in the late 1990s were already being laid off by the millions each
year as thousands of state-owned enterprises were dismantled.[4]
When the crisis broke out in 1997, it abruptly slashed China’s
exports from an annual growth rate of 17.3 percent in 1996 to a
mere 0.5 percent in 1998.[5] China’s leaders looked on nervously as
similar pressure from the crisis prompted student protests in
Indonesia, which eventually forced President Suharto out of power.[6]
There was speculation that China could become “another
Indonesia.”[7]
To keep the economy afloat, China needed to boost domestic
consumption, and economists realized that education was one of the
few sectors where demand was still far greater than supply.[8]
Increasing college enrollment would stimulate spending associated
with education, keep more young people out of the job market for
the time being, and hopefully create a more skilled workforce down
the line. Serious discussion about radically increasing college
recruitment began in March of 1999, and in order to be implemented
in time for the following school year, it would have to be finalized
before the gaokao entrance exam three months later.
Against strong objections by the Ministry of Education, the all-
powerful Politburo Standing Committee pushed the plan ahead
without commissioning any feasibility studies.[9] A high-level
Education Ministry official warned that China’s economy may not be
able to provide enough jobs for these students once they graduated,
and consequently, the social status they ended up with could be far
below their expectations.[10] Nevertheless, the plan went forward.
In the aftermath, schools undertook massive expansions. They
converted vocational schools into full universities, built new
classrooms and campuses, and tried to pack them with students and
professors. China enrolled 42 percent more students in 1999 than it
had the previous year.[11] The country went from one million college
freshmen in 1998, to two million in 2000.[12] Within the following
decade this number surpassed seven million.
“It’s just crazy,” Yong Zhao, the University of Oregon education
professor, told me. “They weren’t ready for any of this. A lot of
professors in China aren’t ready to teach, and the facilities aren’t
ready.”[13]
This massive increase in students, combined with institutions
unprepared to educate them, led to a rapid devaluation of college
degrees. Even though he was surprised by the dismal job market
upon graduation, Liu Geng had sensed earlier that his education was
not preparing him for much. “What you learn has nothing to do with
society,” he said. “But I just wanted to meet my parents’

86
expectations, pass the gaokao, and graduate university. I didn’t
really believe in the education.”

There is a famous saying in China that “getting an education is
above all; everything else is inferior.” For years after the beginning
of reforms in the late 1970s, the saying was unquestionably true.
When the gaokao was reinstated and universities reopened in 1977,
as many as 5.7 million sat for the exam.[14] The 273,000 (4.8 percent
of the candidates) who made the cut were the first to enjoy the
spoils from the new economic policies unfolding then. Many went on
to make staggering fortunes, and through the 1990s a college
degree in China continued to guarantee great opportunities.
By 2010, in contrast, about three-quarters of those who took the
gaokao were admitted to some type of college.[15] Only those who
qualified for the very top-tier universities could count on their degree
guaranteeing anything; over a quarter would still be jobless a year
after graduation.[16] But that did not stop parents from instilling in
their children the expectation that passing the gaokao would open
big doors, just as it had for their own generation.
In 2009, Chinese professor Lian Si published the groundbreaking
book Ant Tribe, which described college graduates living in cheap,
squalid homes on the outskirts of major cities. Scuttling downtown
each day to toil in unfulfilling work, they had little upward mobility.
“They share every similarity with ants,” Lian wrote. “They live in
colonies in cramped areas. They are intelligent and hardworking, yet
anonymous and underpaid.”[17]
Lian estimated that there were over a million of these “ants”
throughout China, three hundred thousand of them concentrated in
Beijing and Shanghai. They come mainly from poorer rural families,
and they persist in the major cities for fear of the shame that
returning home would bring. They slave at low-paying jobs or
dubious unpaid internships on the conviction that things will turn
around and someone will finally recognize their talent.
Soon after Lian’s book was released, reporters descended on the
area on which it had focused, the Tangjialing community on the
outskirts of Beijing’s Haidian district. Once a small village of three
thousand, it experienced rapid growth beginning in 2003. Offering
some of the city’s lowest rental prices, it eventually became home to
some fifty thousand “ants.”[18] Muddy, unpaved roads were
surrounded by dilapidated buildings packed to the brim with people.
Dozens sometimes crammed into a single room, fashioning
hammocks or other improvised beds into tightly cramped spaces.
Those who worked downtown had to endure a two-hour commute in

87
each direction.
Amid the media coverage of this community of squalor, the
Haidian district government announced that it would completely
overhaul the area and demolish most existing structures, as it was
doing with other “ant colonies” around town. There were plenty of
legitimate reasons for doing so. Buildings violated scores of safety
and health codes. There was also money to be made in the area
amid soaring real-estate prices. But some analysts speculated that
these were not the only reasons for the slated demolition. Yu
Jianrong, an outspoken sociologist and member of the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences, said that the concentration of well-
educated but disillusioned youth posed a risk. “As we learn from
history, grassroots intellectuals are the most likely to cause social
turbulence,” Yu told China Daily.[19]
At the same time these “ant tribe” colonies were growing in
major cities, so were the “rat tribes”—people living in dank
apartment complex basements and former bomb shelters. Liu Geng,
my twenty-five-year-old acquaintance, had spent time as both an
“ant” and a “rat”; at one point he lived in a windowless, underground
Tianjin flat for several months.
When I first moved to Beijing, I myself stayed in one of these
rooms for a few days while searching for an apartment. As soon as I
walked down the stairs, it was clear that the basement was never
meant for human habitation. I had to crouch to walk through its
narrow concrete passages and dodge leaky pipes spiraling out in
every direction. My room had thin plywood walls and was barely big
enough for a small bed and nightstand. Unlike most of the rooms in
the basement, it actually had a small window at eye level, enabling
me to view the ankles and shoes shuffling by on the sidewalk
outside. Using the bathroom required a walk to a neighboring
building and a fee of three yuan ($0.47).
The basement’s approximately two dozen residents were a
strange mix of twenty-something university graduates and
uneducated migrant workers in their thirties and forties. By 2012,
the average entry-level wage for university graduates in China had
fallen below that of migrant laborers.[20] These people with very
different backgrounds and expectations were living in equality, quite
literally, at the very bottom of society.
By the end of 2012 the Tangjialing community had been almost
entirely leveled and the Beijing government began a campaign to
clear out people living in illegal basement abodes. As most expected,
though, the “ants” and “rats” just branched out to new areas even
farther from the city center as real-estate prices bolted upward.

88
 Lian Si, the Ant Tribe author, explained that in spite of
disheartening conditions, few of these graduates were willing to
leave the big cities. Working in Beijing or Shanghai brings a certain
prestige and allows young people to be immersed in the poshest
cultural and social networks. Leaving represents a major failure and
a tumble down the social ladder.[21]
Lian also pointed out that many job seekers actually find the
metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai fairer than provincial cities or
smaller towns, where opportunities depend on local relationships,
and guanxi rules the employment market. Because the populations
of the top-tier cities consist predominantly of migrants, local
networks are less entrenched.[22]
In any case, rampant nepotism and corruption in the job market
are hard to avoid anywhere in China. In a 2013 poll, 80.4 percent of
those surveyed believed that young people who achieve career
success in China do so because of their family connections. Only 10
percent thought that hard work, creativity, and academic
achievements beat having a well-connected father.[23]
Among the most sought-after workplaces for college graduates
are banks. Almost entirely state owned, they offer stability, prestige,
connections, and numerous financial opportunities. In 2013 the
Economic Observer newspaper caught up with a Guangzhou bank
employee who oversaw interns. She recalled that she had been one
of the last persons hired under open recruitment back in 2007. The
interns working under her years later included several children of
influential government cadres. “I wouldn’t dare make them work
overtime,” she told the paper. “If they did something wrong, I didn’t
dare say anything about it.”[24]
Around the same time, a man who also allegedly worked with
interns at a state-owned bank posted an essay online illustrating
how crucial family background had become in attaining employment.
He described the internships as little more than a ruse for free labor,
since almost all the permanent positions would be divvied out to
those with connections. Naturally, those from rich and official family
backgrounds went on to do well, whereas the interns from rural or
blue-collar upbringings never came close to landing a job at the
bank. The writer’s conclusion was that young people should accept
their limits and not be so naïve as to think they can overcome their
class background. Whether or not the account was true, it struck a
chord and was reposted on Weibo some twenty-two thousand times.
[25]
Those who lack good family connections often compensate by
purchasing a path to employment. Recent graduates frequently

89
report that securing a good job requires a hefty bribe—sometimes
amounting to several years’ worth of the position’s salary.[26] But
these bribes can have disastrous results. In May 2013 it was
discovered that a criminal ring in Shanxi province had scammed
more than five hundred college students out of 50,000 to 350,000
yuan ($8,000 to $56,000) each by promising to secure them jobs at
banks and other state-owned companies. The ruse was so successful
because this was a routine way to go about getting a cushy job. The
scam also apparently involved real government officials, whom the
students assumed could deliver on their end of the corrupt deal.[27]
Whether it is connections, bribes, or genuine ability that decides
a job, rural youth once again get left far behind their urban
counterparts. A 2013 survey found that 12 percent of urban college
graduates were unemployed, whereas unemployment for rural
graduates was over 30 percent.[28] Because of the uneven playing
field, fu’erdai (second-generation rich) and the even more despised
guan’erdai (second-generation officials) have come to be some of
the most reviled people in China. These are the privileged children of
the extremely wealthy and the politically powerful, respectively;
though there is considerable overlap between the two groups.
The reckless excesses that these young people enjoy with
impunity have become a major sour point among Chinese youth. In
2010 a twenty-two-year-old Hebei man named Li Qingming struck
two college students (one of whom died) in his Volkswagen Magotan
while driving drunk with his girlfriend. He fled the scene but was
later stopped, whereupon he defiantly exclaimed, “Go ahead, sue me
if you dare. My father is Li Gang!”
Li Gang was deputy director of the local public security bureau.
In the past, such brazen, well-connected youth could keep such
incidents secret and literally get away with murder. But by 2010 the
Sina Weibo microblogging platform had emerged. Despite
government efforts to suppress the story, word spread rapidly and
“My father is Li Gang” became an Internet meme that remains
synonymous with out-of-
control official privilege. Li Qingming was later sentenced to six
years in prison and ordered to pay over $80,000 in compensation.[29]
Two years later, when Bo Xilai, a Politburo member and one of
China’s twenty-five most powerful leaders, was arrested on
corruption charges, many analysts speculated that his then twenty-
four-year-old son Bo Guagua had played a role in his downfall.[30]
Pictures of the half-dressed youth cozying up with girls at high-end
parties had circulated on the Internet in China, depicting him as a
wealthy playboy. One Wall Street Journal report even made a

90
disputed claim that he had been spotted driving a Ferrari though
Beijing.[31] At a time when public disgust with privileged guan’erdai
was already undermining government trust, Bo’s downfall served as
a warning to other leaders that they had better keep their kids in line
and out of the public eye.

While Liu Geng was working as a cashier at the grocery store in
Tianjin, customers would yell at him frequently. “Sometimes people
opened food, ate it, then tried to return it,” he said. “They’ll start a
fight over 1 yuan [$0.16] or even 1 mao [<$0.01].” His boss also
criticized him constantly for being too slow and making mistakes.
Between working twelve-hour days and living in a dank underground
cell, Liu could not take it anymore. He quit his job and went back to
Hubei to live with his parents. “That was my lowest point,” he said. “I
just stayed at home and watched a hundred movies over the next
month.”
Liu’s parents were wealthy enough that he could lounge at home
with their support after his job hunt failed. This privilege is
something largely unique to his generation, and something for which
youth like him are often chastised. A 2014 survey by Peking
University found that a full one-third of recent college graduates in
China continued to rely on their parents for money.[32] A common
complaint among recruiters at job fairs in China is that young people
today feel entitled to laid-back, well-paying, fulfilling careers. The
jobs are there, they say, but kids these days are just too spoiled and
unwilling to pay their hardship dues. In 2013 Foxconn founder and
chairman Terry Gou even lamented that young people are less and
less willing to work at factories.[33]
After three years of job hunting and an introspective month at
home, Liu Geng finally came to terms with the fact that his college
diploma was worth little more than the paper it was printed on. At
his mother’s urging, he surfed the Internet to find which skilled
trades were in the highest demand. His parents gave him 10,000
yuan ($1,600) and he settled on a four-month computer
programming course back in Beijing. He excelled in the program and,
shortly thereafter, landed a job in the city designing video games for
mobile phones. “I called my parents and they were really happy,” he
said. “It made me really proud.”
He quickly became an integral part of the company and got a
raise to 12,000 yuan ($1,917) per month, putting him firmly in
China’s middle class. But he still did not feel secure. His parents
were nearing retirement age and he was worried about their future.
“I want to work hard and build a house for them,” he said. “Their

91
house is in bad condition. I don’t want them to live there.” Then
there was the question of marriage and buying his own house, still
very difficult in Beijing even on his decent salary.
Though he could afford to rent a nicer apartment, to save money
Liu moved to the Tiantongyuan community, where he paid 1,000
yuan ($160) in rent each month. Since several “ant colonies” around
the city had been torn down, this low-income complex’s population
had nearly doubled. From the outside its buildings looked nice and
modern, but inside, the improvised beds and overcrowded rooms of
young migrants bore the marks of Tangjialing.
Liu worked sixty hours per week at his company and commuted
an hour each way, leaving little spare time. He felt stable, but the
stress never really subsided. He constantly worried about earning
enough money and saved as much as he possibly could.
Like Liu, even many young professionals who manage to secure
office jobs continue to live in stress. A 2012 Regus survey of eighty
countries found that Chinese office workers had the most anxiety in
the world, with 75 percent reporting that their stress had gone up in
the past year.[34]
Several causes have been blamed, including an unreliable social
safety net and the fear of being unprepared for a family crisis. The
spiraling costs of what are commonly called the “three mountains”—
real estate, education, and healthcare—have imbued a perpetual
need to earn more.
There is also the importance of face. One of Liu Geng’s greatest
motivators was his family’s status in the village. In a 2013 survey of
twenty countries, 71 percent of the Chinese respondents agreed with
the statement “I measure my success by the things I own”—a higher
proportion than in any other country—and 68 percent agreed that “I
feel under a lot of pressure to be successful and make money.”[35]
In early 2013, a twenty-four-year-old employee of the Ogilvy
public relations firm died of a heart attack after allegedly working
overtime for a full month. His last Weibo post before dying showed
the disheveled but smiling man saluting the camera as he left work,
making him an especially sympathetic figure.[36] Ogilvy denied that
he had actually worked a month of overtime, but the story sparked
debate about how much Chinese are sacrificing in order to stay
ahead in the rat race. Every few months, similar stories come to light
of white-collar employees literally working themselves to death.
More than 80 percent of company employees say they frequently
work overtime, and Chinese receive among the world’s fewest
vacation days.[37]
Still, all this hard work usually fails to bring the status that young

92
Chinese crave. The highly visible success stories reported over the
past three decades have left many today feeling that they have
missed the boat. With nepotism and corruption thriving, there is an
impression that the best resources have already been distributed
and will continue to accumulate among the already wealthy. China’s
Gini coefficient, an international measure of wealth distribution
where zero means perfect equality and 1 signifies total
concentration of wealth, surpassed the “danger level” of 0.40 in
2000. The government did not release the figure for the following
twelve years until 2012, when it claimed the Gini to be 0.47 and
falling after having peaked in 2008. However, independent
researchers estimated that in 2010 the true number was 0.61, which
would make China one of the most unequal societies in the world.[38]
This inequality is painfully felt among educated young people as
they watch jobs, promotions, and social status drifting toward those
who won the birth lottery. It is becoming an ever greater source of
inadequacy and resentment.

In 2013, an essay entitled “Why Generation Y Yuppies Are
Unhappy” went viral in the United States.[39] It mapped the root of
widespread professional dissatisfaction among American youth, but
it could just as aptly be applied to China.
The essay started with a simple premise: “When the reality of
someone’s life is better than they had expected, they’re happy.
When reality turns out to be worse than the expectations, they’re
unhappy.” It explained that the “Greatest Generation” of Americans,
those who lived through the Depression and World War II, had
become obsessed with economic security and raised their children
with modest expectations. When those kids, the Baby Boomers, grew
up through the 1970s to 1990s, the American economy took off.
They had more prosperous lives than they had expected, and thus
they were happy. But they then raised their Generation Y children
with a very optimistic outlook and much more ambitious dreams.
After the US economy began to suffer in the 2000s, Generation Y
was left with unfulfilled ambitions and severe disappointment,
manifested with particular intensity in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street
movement as disgruntled American youth protested a broken and
corrupt system that enabled skewed wealth distribution.
The same dynamic was ringing true in China, but to an even
greater extreme. The generation of Liu Geng’s parents rode the
wave of double-digit economic growth for three decades. Many toiled
in dangerous factories or spent long days doing backbreaking farm
work, but they were happy to have it. They made money and had

93
food in their stomachs—and that was better than the experience of
their own parents, China’s “Greatest Generation,” who had suffered
through endless wars, famine, and a long string of insane political
campaigns that made mere survival a daily struggle. When the
political chaos finally settled and the economy took off in the 1980s
and 1990s, China’s baby boomers were perpetually optimistic and
passed that optimism on to their kids. Now that China’s millennials
are struggling, feelings of disillusionment are taking hold.
When the Occupy Wall Street movement began in the United
States, Chinese state media initially reported it with glee.
Highlighting political dissatisfaction and capitalist exploitation in
Western countries is a self-legitimizing staple of the Communist
Party. However, the media quickly changed its tune when young
Chinese began expressing sympathy with the Occupy movement
tweeting messages like “Occupy Beijing” and “Occupy Shanghai.” As
one Chinese social commentator put it: “China faces more serious
problems of financial oligarchism, corruption and inequality than
America. But ‘Occupy Chang’an Jie’ [the street that runs past
Tiananmen Square] is no more than a fairy tale. In China, a jobless,
homeless protester would not reach Beijing before disappearing
mysteriously.”[40] Indeed, searches for “Occupy” terms were blocked
on Weibo and Chinese journalists were reportedly told to stop
covering the movement.[41]
A few months after the job fair in Beijing, I called the two young
college grads from Hebei whom I had met there. They had both
given up on the capital and returned to their hometown to search for
jobs. Each one had reluctantly begun working in a factory while
looking.
Unemployed and discouraged college graduates like these have
not yet presented any obvious threat to the government or to social
stability. Only a few years have passed since the job crunch began.
As the persevering ant tribes of Beijing demonstrate, there is an
optimism that things will turn around eventually. One study in 2014
found that 85 percent of Chinese post-90s youth were confident
about their country’s economic prospects, and 76 percent were
optimistic about the country’s political future.[42] And like Liu Geng,
many still have parents on whom they can fall back when the going
gets tough.
The key question is whether these educated youth will remain
quiet in future years if the job market does not pick up as their
parents begin to age and become more financially dependent on
them. Zhou Tianmin, a member of China’s top political advisory
body, told the Global Times, “They were told education could change

94
their lives, but now that they can’t find a job after college, they
might feel angry at society.”[43]
China’s Communist Party has assiduously studied where
previous political institutions went wrong and there is ample reason
for concern. One cautionary tale is that of Hong Xiuquan. A poor
peasant in the mid-nineteenth century, he excelled academically
from a young age and was determined to enter the exclusive
government bureaucracy. But he was thwarted. He consistently
failed the civil service exam while wealthier applicants bribed their
way to passing scores. Sickened with failure, he began to see visions
and ultimately decided that he was Jesus Christ’s younger brother,
destined to set the kingdom straight.
Hong had little trouble whipping up followers; many were
similarly disillusioned after failing the exam and plenty more were
fed up with inequality and Qing dynasty corruption. Hong gradually
amassed an army by preaching utopian communalism and
bastardized Christianity. By the time his Taiping Rebellion was
suppressed in 1864, some 20 million Chinese lay dead.
Frustrated students and graduates from the May 4th Movement
in 1919 through the Tiananmen uprising in 1989 have similarly
proven a dangerous and disruptive force when they felt that their
government had failed them. And there is evidence of a comparable
gathering storm today. The year after Lian Si published Ant Tribe, he
conducted another survey of the nation’s “ants.” He found that 57
percent of troubled college graduates blamed their difficulties on
social circumstances rather than any faults of their own. Lian said
this is a worrying statistic, because it indicates a loss of trust in the
government and could lead young people to band together against
the society that had failed them.[44]
But for all the frustration that young people express toward the
government, they are nevertheless lining up in record numbers to
become part of it.
1. “New Grads Crowd Tightening Job Market.” Global Times, May 28,
2013. Accessed January 11, 2014.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/784976.shtml.
2. Liu, Geng. Interview by author, Beijing, September 2013.
3. Gan, Li. “Findings from the China Household Finance Survey.”
Texas A&M University and Southwestern University of Finance and
Economics (2012). Accessed January 14, 2014.
http://chfs.swufe.edu.cn/upload/files/Report-English-Sep-2012–2.pdf.
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 Chapter 7
The Golden Rice Bowl
If you were a corrupt Chinese official in the late 1990s, there was
perhaps no swankier place than the “Red Chamber” in Xiamen,
Fujian province.
Beloved businessman Lai Changxing ran a not-so-secret
smuggling ring that brought everything from foreign cigarettes to
petroleum into China’s black market. But keeping the wheels turning
in the illicit empire required a lot of grease.
The Red Chamber was Lai’s seven-story sin palace. Its dance
floors, jacuzzis, steam room, and extravagant bedrooms hosted
hundreds of law enforcement officers and cadres reaching high into
the Fujian provincial government (and perhaps even higher).
Working girls from across the country were on hand to entertain the
powerful guests, and a famous singer was allegedly coaxed into
disrobing for millions of yuan.
Eventually, the operation got out of hand and national
authorities cracked down on it. Dozens of officials were arrested and
Lai fled to Canada (only to be extradited; he received a life sentence
in 2011). Hoping to use the sordid affair as a cautionary tale, the
government opened the Red Chamber to the public as an
anticorruption museum. But the opulence of this “Graceland of
Graft” apparently sent the wrong message. Giddy tourists swarmed
in, along with wealthy industrialists keen to take notes on the
building’s features. The museum was shut down soon after it
opened.[1]
During a 2002 interview in Canada, Lai Changxing said, “The
whole system in China is corrupt. To get ahead, you have to become
part of that system.”[2]
Today many young Chinese appear to be coming to the same
conclusion. The obvious doors that officialdom opens and the bleak
prospects elsewhere have sent graduates flocking to apply for
government jobs.
For more than 1,400 years, China has used imperial exams off
and on to determine admittance to the government bureaucracy. The
civil service exam was reinstated at the national level in 1994, and
today it is usually the first step that an aspiring cadre must pass on
the way up the political ladder. The Communist Party touts this
merit-based exam, saying that only the brightest and most
deserving gain government posts.
Most who take the exam have no intention of becoming
politically active, though. Civil service jobs have long been part of

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what is known as China’s “Iron Rice Bowl,” referring to stable state
jobs with housing benefits, generous pensions, and immunity from
layoffs. More recently, some have taken to calling these jobs the
“Golden Rice Bowl” in a nod to the wide range of perks, legal and
otherwise, that they can provide. Passing the exam is regarded as a
golden ticket to sidestepping the many uncertainties in China’s
economy.
In 2013, a record 1.52 million people registered for the test—
more than twenty times the number a decade earlier. They
competed for just 19,500 available posts, a ratio of 77 applicants per
job.[3] Some openings had as many 9,000 applicants, with some of
the more popular posts concentrated in sectors with substantial
power such as security, personnel, and customs.[4]

In 2008 I met a young undergraduate law student named Mae (a
pseudonym). She was soft-spoken, but incredibly sharp. From
primary school through college, she had always been among the top
students in her class. She rarely spoke up when in a group, but when
she did, she left an impression.
Her father had been a civil servant and prodded her to try the
exam. She had been focusing on getting into graduate school but
obliged him by diving into civil service exam prep books just two
weeks before the test. To the envy of her classmates who had spent
months and years studying for it, she passed.
Mae had never seriously considered civil service; she had
dreamed of becoming a lawyer or judge. But what she learned
during her college years cast a dark shadow over that plan. “It’s
ridiculous to talk about law in China,” she said. “What determines
the winner of a case isn’t the law.”
Her civil service test results sealed the decision. Her score meant
that she would be assigned to the coveted customs bureau in Beijing
—an opportunity too good to pass up.
“Historically, customs has had its glory days in China,” Mae said.
“But it has a very negative reputation now. People say it’s extremely
corrupt with a lot of illegal income, but the people who say these
words actually want to be part of it.”
Mae started at the bureau at age twenty-two and was housed in
a large dorm room with three coworkers. She had generous perks
like free cafeteria meals and pool and gym memberships. Moreover,
in stark contrast to most white-collar workers in the city, she had a
stable work schedule of 9:00 to 4:30 each day. But the salary was a
modest 4,500 yuan ($720) per month. “People think I make a lot,”
she said. “When I tell them how much I actually make, they don’t

100
believe me, or they wink and say, ‘yeah, but you have other
benefits.’”
Her work assignment made her essentially a paper pusher, but
one with great power over multi-million-dollar companies. Importers
would come to her window and she would determine the
classification and tariff amount on the goods presented, or she could
deem the claim suspicious and send it for inspection. If she gave a
company a bad mark, it could make importing harder for them for
years. But she could also make their lives very easy. “Even at the
bureau’s very lowest level, everyone has the power to be corrupt,”
she said.
At first Mae worked hard and was nice to everyone, but she
quickly learned what a mistake that was. “If you’re really nice,
people won’t take you seriously and will regard you as a weak
target,” she said, referring both to importers and coworkers. “Now I
just have a bad attitude so I don’t get caught in their trap.”
Mae had little threat of ever getting fired if she underperformed.
In order for a civil servant to be terminated, they must be deemed
“incompetent” on their annual assessment for two consecutive
years. In 2010, less than 1 percent of civil servants in China received
this censure, and only about 0.05 percent are actually dismissed
each year (as of 2009).[5]
In theory, Mae and the other three who held the same position
had a daily quota of claims to process. In practice, everyone
purposely worked far less efficiently than what they were capable of.
They feared creating high expectations and leaving the impression
that they were trying to outshine colleagues. They rarely exceeded
half the daily target, and their superiors never complained. “I’m an
example of how a hardworking, positive person can become the
opposite,” Mae scoffed.
But Mae drew the line at accepting expensive gifts; that was a
slippery slope she had no desire to go down. She had never been
offered outright cash, but importers often brought presents. She felt
it was their way of testing the waters. If they became too pushy, she
would just hand the case off to a superior.
Her refusal to take part in corruption, Mae opined, would
probably keep her from advancing very far in the department. At her
low rank, she could stay honest without stepping on anybody’s toes,
but if she rose to a higher position her unwillingness to participate in
standard practice could put a target on her back. “Most people work
for the government just for money,” she said. “Otherwise, what’s the
point?”
A 2013 study by Tian Guoliang of the Central Party School, the
CCP’s preeminent cadre training center, found that among corrupt

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officials who were sacked, the average period between their first
crime and their exposure was less than a year during the 1980s.
That time period expanded to over four years in the 1990s and was
nearly nine years when he conducted the study. Tian also found that
63 percent of the sacked officials had been promoted while engaging
in corruption—a trend that had been getting worse over time.[6]
According to Ren Jianming, a governance professor from Beijing
University of Aeronautics and Astronautics who studies graft,
corruption can spread like a virus through a department. A corrupt
official will promote other corrupt officials in order to keep him or
herself safe, whereas anyone clean will be distrusted and disdained.
[7] As time goes on, entire bureaus become irreversibly tainted and

honest cadres either become corrupted or languish in isolation at the

bottom. This may be one reason why, as one government source
(citing an internal Communist Party survey) told Reuters in 2014,
more than 30 percent of Party, government, and military officials are
involved in some form of corruption.[8]
People did periodically get busted in Mae’s bureau. She recalled
hearing of a predecessor who became a bit too bold, buying a car
after his first year of work and a house after the second. By the third
year he was in jail. Such instances were rare, however, and when
people did get caught it was usually the result of an internal power
struggle. “If two of us take bribes, for example, but I want to replace
you or we have conflict, I’ll report you or set you up,” she explained.
“It’s almost never a matter of authorities just finding out on their
own.”
It was hard to guess who was corrupt and how much they were
profiting. The parking lot had several luxury cars, but many cadres
came from rich families. Furthermore, it was becoming more difficult
to define what constituted a bribe, let alone detect it. Cadres getting
married might invite importers that they worked with to the
ceremony, receiving as a wedding gift a customary hongbao (red
envelope) stuffed with thousands of yuan. Or they might be invited
out for an expensive night of feasting and karaoke with hostesses
who might offer to go home with them. A former “hostess” at Lai
Changxing’s Red Chamber later recalled entertaining, during the
1990s, a big-nosed Beijing customs official who would come on
retreats to one of the building’s luxury suites.[9]
This kind of schmoozing was also common internally at the
customs bureau, and it could be a critical part of getting promoted.
“Once at a banquet a girl ignored protocol, sat right beside the
leader, and drank a lot,” Mae recalled. “He was impressed, and soon
after he moved her from airport customs to a better job in the main

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office. Drinking is a great asset.”
Mae had no interest in playing these games. As cynical as she
had become, she was perfectly content to punch in at her stable
position and leave it at that. “I feel I’m an upstanding person,” she
said. “If I get promoted, my official salary won’t change much and
I’m not willing to abuse my power for money, so I don’t really want
to move up.”
Promotions actually depended in part on merit-based testing,
which Mae viewed as progress from past practices. And occasionally
people up the power chain actually needed a good worker, so they
would promote based on ability. But according to Mae, there were
three much more reliable ways to climb the ladder: joining the
corrupt circles of superiors, having a family member with a high
government position, or “being a beautiful girl.” When I naïvely
asked whether it was enough to simply be beautiful, Mae rolled her
eyes and scoffed, “What do you think?”
In 2014, even the Communist Party Organization Department
came to a similar conclusion. An internal survey involving thousands
of cadres revealed a “deeply flawed” promotion system, with
nepotism and position selling running rampant due to leaders
monopolizing the process for their own purposes.[10]
I told Mae the story of Frank Serpico, the 1960s-era American
police officer who shunned corruption in his department and
ultimately tried to clean things up, earning him disdain (and possibly
a murder attempt) from the dirty cops. “I’m not as upstanding as
Serpico,” she replied. “Everyone has their own way to get by in this
country. I won’t do it, but if you want to take bribes, it doesn’t
concern me. I won’t stop you.”

Over the years I talked with many young people who had come
to believe that there were few clean paths to success. The best bet,
they believed, was to learn the tacit rules and exploit them. After all,
if you did not become a beneficiary of the system, you were sure to
become a victim of it. When Education Ministry officials came to
inspect the university where I taught, I asked one student—who was
planning to take the civil service exam—whether he thought they
took bribes. “Probably,” he replied with a half-smile. “That’s why we
all want that job.”
Many who do not go into civil service still seek benefits by
pursuing Communist Party membership. The CCP has over 80 million
members throughout the country, but gaining admission is tough.
Eight out of ten students want to join, according to a Ministry of
Education survey, but in 2010 only 14 percent of the 21 million

103
applicants were accepted.[11]
From a very young age, Chinese pupils are taught the value of
Party membership through the Young Pioneers. Participation in this
group, overseen by the Communist Youth League, is required for
most children age six to fourteen. They wear red scarves,
representing the blood shed by the Revolution’s martyrs, and they
pledge: “I love the Communist Party of China, the motherland, and
the people; I will study well and keep myself fit, preparing to
contribute my efforts to the cause of Communism.”[12]
When they turn fourteen, they can join the Communist Youth
League, which most high school students do for at least a few years.
This is where grooming of potential Party members begins in
earnest. It is also where young people preview the perks that Party
membership offers and the politicking needed in order to rise.
Members who stand out (or make the right connections) can be
appointed to higher positions with actual power in the organization,
which can help them get a job or full Party membership later.
Those who want to pursue the political track might seek a
position in their college’s student government. These “student
unions,” as they are called in China, are a bit different from their
Western counterparts in that they are overseen by the university’s
Communist Youth League faculty. Their duties include organizing
school activities, maintaining connections with other universities,
and preparing reports for Party officials.
The best candidates for selection as student government
members are excellent students who are also politically reliable.
Compared to their Western counterparts, the student body president
holds more power over the student government. The person who fills
this position is chosen directly by Communist Youth League faculty
from a pool of candidates recommended by the union. Selection as
president is highly prestigious and puts a student on the fast track to
Party membership and great opportunities in government or state-
owned enterprises after graduation. According to media interviews
with student government officers, male student presidents also tend
to become very popular with girls after securing this position. Even
rank-and-file student union members are known to get preferential
treatment at their universities, which can cause them to become
alienated from other students.[13]
When it comes time to apply for full CCP membership, top
students are again singled out for invitations to apply. Others can
ask Party acquaintances for nomination. This begins a lengthy
process that can involve one to two years of ideology classes,
background checks, interviews, and self-criticism sessions with

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peers. Applicants must also keep a journal in which they record their
activities, thoughts on society, and motivations for joining the Party.

A group of college students become Communist Party members at their

swearing-in ceremony.
(Photo: xiaogushi.com)
In 2001, a CCP-friendly pop singer released a music video
entitled “Application to Join the Party” depicting a model candidate.
“As young as eighteen I’d already written my Party application,” the
song begins. “I’ve read the Party Constitution countless times, but
always felt I wasn’t worthy of its standards.” The lyrics describe how
the young man drew inspiration from the countless martyrs who
shed their blood for the Party’s cause, seeking neither fame nor
fortune. “What is a Party member?” the vocalist asks while looking
longingly at a Mao Zedong statue. “They’re a servant of the people;
the backbone of the common man; the red candle that burns itself to
bring light to others.”[14]
The video elicits laughter from young Chinese, but I have been
told that it represents exactly the sort of flowery language Party
applicants must use in their journals if they hope to be accepted.
Others have said that a better approach is to write the journal as a
love letter, simply substituting “the Communist Party” for your
lover’s name.
It would be an exaggeration to say that no young Chinese
applicants still believe in the Party’s ideological underpinnings. I
have met some youth who sincerely believe that socialist
egalitarianism can be achieved if only a few kinks in the government
apparatus could be worked out. One fiercely loyal student wrote in a
class essay that his life’s goal was “to die for the Party.”

105
 But most peers tend to mock such people as hopelessly naïve.
Even back in 2001, a university survey among those who had
already joined the Party found that only 4 percent did so because of
a genuine belief in Communism.[15] Perhaps the surest sign of the
low number of true idealists entering China’s political system is the
existence of civil service positions that struggle to find applicants.
While posts with significant power attract thousands, jobs that might
have a more deeply meaningful impact are virtually shunned. Posts
in disaster relief that require frequent trips to dangerous areas get
little interest; positions in poor, remote regions with few
opportunities to make connections or get attractive promotions often
fail to attract a single applicant.[16]
For most people, Party membership is a purely pragmatic
decision. Employers know the highly selective CCP application
process, so being accepted is a major résumé booster. And for those
who hope to climb the ladder as a civil servant or in a state-owned
company, Party membership is compulsory.[17]
In 2013, Professor Zhang Xi’en from the School of Politics and
Public Administration at Shandong University lamented that too
many people were using Party membership as a path to personal
gain. “They swarm into the Party, rapidly expanding its scale, and
bringing tremendous danger to it,” he said, suggesting that it
downsize from over 80 million members to around 50 million.[18]
Later that year, the Party did in fact add more requirements for
young students and lengthened the application process. The
following year, the number of new applications dropped for the first
time in ten years.[19]
However, the Party’s eagerness to snap up the most capable and
ambitious students—regardless of their motivations—will likely never
abate. While it does want the best and the brightest to fill its ranks,
sweeping up these elite students is also a way of co-opting capability
and ambition that could become a threat if directed against the
prevailing system.

Meanwhile, the Communist Party has also tried to polish its
image to escape being viewed as a corruption-ridden old boys’ club.
In 2011 The Founding of a Party, a high-budget film depicting the
Communist Party’s birth featuring dozens of the country’s hottest
stars, was released. But even the scintillating star power and
vigorous promotional efforts by the state apparatus failed to draw
much popular interest. After early box-office returns disappointed,
schools, government bureaus, and state-owned companies were
ordered to buy tickets in bulk and give employees and students half

106
a day off to see the film.[20] Some online commentators derided the
hypocritical glorification of the Communist Party’s early struggle
against corruption and one-party dictatorship.[21]
In a more practical effort to restore the government’s reputation,
President Xi Jinping in late 2012 vowed to go after both the “flies”
and the “tigers” (low- and high-level officials) in an anticorruption
crackdown. He also instituted a raft of government austerity
measures meant to quell extravagant spending and graft. The
measures included toning down official banquets, limiting the use of
expensive government cars for private use, and barring cadres from
having ostentatious weddings or holding membership in high-end
nightclubs. While the campaign did in fact snag several “tigers” and
was lauded by the public, it did little to address the root cause of
corruption—namely, that the police, courts, and media are controlled
by the same people. Party sources also told Reuters in early 2014
that one of the motivations for Xi’s campaign was to purge
opponents and replace them with his own people.[22]
Still, the anticorruption drive appeared to have real effects that
were further-reaching than the countless campaigns that had
preceded it over the years. A year after it began, the liberal Beijing
News conducted a survey of one hundred government cadres. As
fear that Xi’s campaign might finally be for real spread across
Chinese officialdom, 92 percent said their “outside work income” had
fallen and 79 percent said they had stopped taking gifts. One
anonymously quoted cadre said that the restrictions had made life
simpler. Whereas he was previously obligated to entertain and drink
four nights a week, he could now spend time at home and let his
liver recover.[23] Industries heavily associated with corruption, like
luxury items, baijiu liquor, and high-end restaurants, saw sales tank.
[24]
Xi’s austerity campaign was also clearly felt within Mae’s
customs bureau. It canceled its annual New Year’s party, which in
years past had featured expensive alcohol and hired dancers. Official
banquets also switched from serving Maotai (a Chinese liquor costing
thousands of yuan per bottle) to imported wine. However, public
perceptions did not change immediately. A few months into the
campaign, workers at the customs bureau were amused to discover,
as they poured into the parking lot at the end of a work day, that
someone had written “Can I be your mistress?” in dust on the
Mercedes belonging to Mae’s boss.
Mae said that working in the government had left her with an
even greater distrust of higher-level officials, but it had also given
her an appreciation of how much they have to juggle: “Now I feel it’s

107
hard to solve a problem since it concerns all kinds of interest groups.
In my work, sometimes I see a small issue, but in order to solve it we
have to change many things. That’s nothing compared to the task of
solving a complex nationwide problem.”
Though she had long ago abandoned her dreams of a law career,
Mae still had a fondness for the field and thought that the rule of law
was what China needed most. She invoked the writings of the
philosopher Mencius (third century BC), who believed that poor
moral character is the result of bad societal influence. “Chinese
society and Chinese people’s nature in general are worse today than
before,” Mae said. “In the past there were morals. People cared
about what others thought and didn’t dare do evil things. That’s not
how it is now. There’s no lawful system, so people have abandoned
the old morals and do whatever they want.”
During my years in China I met numerous young people like Mae,
quite smart but coldly realistic about their options. On several
occasions, high-performing students asked me whether joining the
Communist Party would hurt their chances at getting an American
green card later (it does). For the best and brightest, the two most
promising paths seemed to be either to extract what they could from
China’s broken system or to get out of it altogether.
Like Mae, many who are thrilled when they pass the civil service
exam quickly learn that this success does not mean they have won
the game. They have only earned the right to play. If they are not
deft enough to understand the unspoken rules, they will not advance
far.
“The more idealistic you are, the more painful it is,” Mae said.
“Some people don’t want to change society because they benefit
from it. I don’t like society and want to change it, but I can’t, so
what’s the point of thinking about it?”
Mae knew that she was too smart for her job, but she had been
lulled into complacency. She was content to milk what she could
from a system she could not change. Her biggest fear was that
someday the milk might dry up. “I used to worry about losing my job
because of the regime changing,” she said. “But the chances of that
are small. Maybe the CCP won’t collapse, but maybe China will
become really good and no longer need this ridiculous job.”
1. August, Oliver. Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China’s
Most Wanted Man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
2. Beech, Hannah. “Smuggler’s Blues.” Time, October 14, 2002.
Accessed January 18, 2014.
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2056114,00.html.
3. Hite, Brittany. “Chinese Grads Still Eager to Nab Government
Jobs.” Wall Street Journal, November 27, 2013. Accessed January 18,

108
2014. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/11/27/chinese-grads-
still-eager-to-nab-government-jobs/.
4. “China’s Civil Servants: Aspiring Mandarins.” The Economist,
December 16, 2010. Accessed October 17, 2014.
http://www.economist.com/node/17732957; Roberts, Dexter. “In
China, a ‘Golden Rice Bowl’ for Civil Service.” Businessweek, October
26, 2012. Accessed October 16, 2014.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012–10–26/in-china-a-
golden-rice-bowl-for-civil-service.
5. Xue, Bai, Zhang Zhongju, and Hua Dan. “” [Survey Research on
Motivation of College Students Takes Civil Service Examination Tide
Countermeasure]. Hubei Social Science 96, no. 1 (2010): 21–23;
Zhai, Jiaoyi. “” [Analysis on Graduates’ Preference for the Civil
Service]. Public Administration Review 19, no. 1 (2010): 27–42.
6. Tian, Guoliang. “” [Inspiration of High Official Corruption Cases].
Study Times, 2013.
7. Han, Yong. “Graft Breeds Graft.” News China Magazine, September
2013. Accessed October 18, 2014.
http://www.newschinamag.com/magazine/graft-breeds-graft. For
further reading see Ren, Jianming, and Zhizhou Du. [Corruption
and Anticorruption Theory: Models and Approaches]. Beijing:
Tsinghua University Press, 2009.
8. Lim, Benjamin. “China’s Xi Purging Corrupt Officials to Put Own
Men in Place: Sources.” Reuters, April 16, 2014. Accessed April 17,
2014. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/16/us-china-
corruption-xi-insight-idUSBREA3F1UT20140416.
9. Beech, “Smuggler’s Blues.”
10. Party Building Institute of the Communist Party Organization
Department. [Research Report on Increasing Public Confidence
the Selection and Appointment of Cadres]. Communist Party
Organization Department, 2014.
11. Moore, Malcolm. “Chinese Students Flock to Join the Communist
Party.” The Telegraph, August 9, 2013. Accessed January 18, 2014.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10234401/Chinese-
students-flock-to-join-the-Communist-Party.html; “China Communist
Party ‘Exceeds 80 Million Members.’” BBC News, June 11, 2011.
Accessed October 18, 2014. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-
pacific-13901509.
12. “” [Chinese Young Pioneers Charter]. National People’s
Congress, 2005.
http://61.gqt.org.cn/sxd/200905/t20090512_239909.htm.
13. Fang, Ye. “” [University Vanity Fair]. Economic Observer, sec.
Lifestyle, September 12, 2012.
14. Jiang, Tao, and He Peixun. “” [Application to Join the Party].

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Hubei TV and Wuhan Steel Group.
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNjA0NDMwOTY=.html.
15. Chen, Xiaohui, and Chen Xingjun. “” [On Strengthening
Education of Motives to Join the Party among University Students].
Journal of Yanan College of Education 36, no. 2 (2002): 5.
16. Roberts, Dexter. “In China, a ‘Golden Rice Bowl’ for Civil Service.”
Businessweek, October 26, 2012. Accessed January 15, 2014.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012–10–26/in-china-a-
golden-rice-bowl-for-civil-service; Li, Raymond. “Harder Than Ever to
Find Prized Civil Service Job in China.” South China Morning Post,
November 5, 2013. Accessed October 17, 2014.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1348306/civil-service-
recruitment-speed-dating-applicant-admits.
17. Guo, Gang. “Party Recruitment of College Students in China.”
Journal of Contemporary China 14, no. 43 (2007): 371–93.
18. “3000” [Scholars Suggest Downsizing Communist Party by 30
Million Members]. news.ifeng.com, May 18, 2003. Accessed October
18, 2014.
http://news.ifeng.com/shendu/rmlt/detail_2013_05/18/25451326_0.shtml
Yuen, Lotus, trans. “Communist Party Membership Is Still the
Ultimate Resume Booster.” The Atlantic, May 29, 2013. Accessed
January 19, 2014.
http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/05/communist-party-
membership-is-still-the-ultimate-resume-booster/276347/.
19. Sanderson, Henry. “China’s Communist Party Reports First New
Member Drop in Decade.” Bloomberg News, June 30, 2014. Accessed
October 18, 2014. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014–06–
30/china-s-communist-party-reports-first-new-member-drop-in-
decade.html.
20. Ford, Peter. “How to Ensure a Movie Becomes a Blockbuster in
China? Trickery.” Christian Science Monitor, July 11, 2011. Accessed
January 18, 2014. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-
News/2011/0711/How-to-ensure-a-movie-becomes-a-blockbuster-in-
China-Trickery.
21. Lam, Oiwan. “China: Mixed Reactions to Communist Party Movie
Epic.” Global Voices, June 17, 2011. Accessed October 18, 2014.
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/06/17/china-mixed-reactions-to-
communist-party-movie-epic/.
22. Lim, “China’s Xi Purging.”
23. “‘’ ” [80 Percent of Officials Stop Taking Gifts Amid Ban].
Beijing News, January 9, 2014. Accessed January 15, 2014.
http://www.bjnews.com.cn/feature/2014/01/09/301118.html.
24. Ranasinghe, Dhara. “Tough Times for Luxury Retail in China.”
CNBC, June 19, 2014. Accessed October 18, 2014.

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http://www.cnbc.com/id/101771742#.

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 Chapter 8
The Entrepreneurs
Soon after Xi Jinping ascended to China’s presidency in 2013, he
continued a longstanding tradition by marking Youth Day on May 4
with outstanding students. At the country’s leading spacecraft
development facility, he hosted a group of aspiring young innovators
ranging from space technology engineers to agricultural researchers.
Uniformly well-groomed, they crowded around Xi for a picture,
flashing big smiles.
On the surface, the meeting was little more than a routine photo
opportunity, but there was an important subtext. China was
exhausting its ability to grow on the back of cheap labor and exports
as it had done for thirty years. Wages were rising and the yuan was
appreciating, slowly stripping the country of its “workshop of the
world” appeal. Analysts warned that China could soon fall into the
“middle-income trap.”[1] This occurs when a country maximizes the
level of economic growth attainable through the low-hanging fruit of
cheap exports and catch-up growth in existing industries, but still
lacks the technological prowess to compete at the higher end of the
value chain and create new products. If the Chinese economic
miracle was to keep steaming ahead, it would have to become more
innovative.
Xi invoked what had become the cornerstone slogan of his
presidency at this meeting, calling the younger generation the hope
for realizing the “Chinese dream.”[2]
What was this Chinese dream? In many ways it seemed to echo
the American dream, envisioning a nation where all would have
equal opportunity to work hard and fulfill their ambitions. But Xi’s
Chinese dream had a slight difference.
He first used the phrase in 2012, weeks after becoming general
secretary of the Communist Party. Flanked by the new Politburo
Standing Committee, he stood in the National Museum’s “Road
toward Renewal” exhibition adjacent to Tiananmen Square, which
detailed foreign atrocities committed during the “Century of
Humiliation” and explained how the Communist Party finally
rejuvenated China’s drive toward world prominence. The Chinese
dream described by Xi included a tinge of nationalism and would be
a source of emotional legitimacy for the CCP. One analyst called it “a
collectivist counterpoint to the American dream.”[3]
At the May 4 gathering, Xi encouraged students to “emancipate
the mind, advance with the times, forge ahead, and innovate.” But
then he added a caveat: “Only by integrating individual dreams to

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the national cause can one finally make great achievement.”
An official Party journal would later elaborate on the slogan by
saying, “Only the path of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,
found through untold hardships experienced extensively by the
Chinese Communist Party, is the correct path in the human world to
realize the Chinese dream. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
lets our dreams take flight.”[4]
Shi Kaiwen apparently did not quite fit this conception of the
Chinese dream. This young piano prodigy seemed a perfect role
model for the innovative entrepreneurship that China needed. By
age twenty-three he had already started three different companies.
His current venture was an online radio service called Jing.FM, which
applied acoustic analysis to algorithms and thereby allowed users to
listen to music that matched their mood. Over $1 million in
investment had found its way to the company by 2013, as it grew to
thirty employees. It was creating buzz in tech circles and landed Shi
on a Forbes list of disruptive Chinese entrepreneurs under thirty
shaking up the tech market.[5]
Shi’s success intrigued a state-owned Bei​jing television station
that was doing a series on young people living out the Chinese
dream. But when the film crew showed up, they found a self-
described hippie with shoulder-length hair and a goatee. In a clear
contrast to the clean-cut kids in Xi Jinping’s photo opportunity, Shi
was scruffy and rarely wore anything nicer than a T-shirt and jeans,
even when speaking to investors.
The interviewer probed Shi about his upbringing and what had
prompted him to take the entrepreneurial plunge; he replied that his
musical talent and innovativeness were a direct result of his parents’
divorce. When asked about his study habits, Shi said that he often
skipped classes in school and argued with his teachers. “No, no, no,
this is inappropriate,” the interviewer huffed, before shifting gears.
Before leaving, the producer told Shi in so many words that his
story did not quite match the theme of the series. The segment
never aired.
“The hope of this nation is free thinkers, not just good students,”
Shi later told me when recounting the interview. “The Chinese dream
should be about many people pursuing their own dreams.”[6]

Before China’s civil war in the 1940s, Shi’s family had ties to the
ruling Kuomintang Party. When the Communists took power, this
status consigned his grandparents to laborious work assignments in
the far reaches of China’s northern frontier. His parents likewise
suffered throughout their childhood, which coincided with the

113
Cultural Revolution. They were both just eighteen when pushed into
marriage in 1981. Shi was born in 1988, but his parents divorced
several years later when dissolving marriages became less socially
taboo.
His father’s business had pulled Shi from city to city, never
leaving him in one place long enough to complete a full school year.
Then, amid the divorce, Shi and his sister were handed off to a series
of different family members. During this time he used piano as his
escape, just as he had done since age four. “Music saved my soul,”
he said. “It made me optimistic. Otherwise I might have gotten
caught up in drugs or crime.”
Shi’s rough upbringing had a silver lining. He did not face the
same pressure to study and pass tests that most of his peers did—
his parents simply did not care. Instead he poured his energy into his
own creative pursuits. “Maybe people from broken families have
more independent thinking and are more artistic,” he suggested.
“They’re more willing to think and communicate with others, which is
very important for a startup company.”
In high school writing classes, Shi would come up with odd
poems and stories that did not exactly fit the desired answer on
assignments. Some instructors gave him a zero, but one teacher
encouraged Shi’s unconventional musings. “There’s a big contrast
between teachers who encourage creativity and those who don’t,”
Shi said. “Many teachers don’t like students who are too creative.”
He remained devoted to piano and, at age sixteen, was admitted
to China’s top music college, the Central Conservatory of Music in
Bei​jing. But even the education at that prestigious school failed to
inspire him. “Some subjects are nonsense,” he said. “That’s why I
skipped classes—they don’t make sense and some teachers aren’t
even as good as the students. The most useful stuff I got at
university I got from self-study.”
One skill he taught himself was computer coding, which he used
to start a music website at age eighteen after scrounging up
investment from family members. He later sold that company and
started a second project, a social music-sharing service, which lasted
two years until a change in copyright law scared away his biggest
investor. “That was my worst day,” Shi recalled. “I suddenly realized
I had no money and everybody left. I felt my life would be a failure.”
He stayed in bed for days and then took on a few jobs at other
music companies, but the itch to create something of his own
persisted. By the following year, Bei​jing’s startup ecosystem had
grown and Shi had the idea for Jing.FM. “My biggest motivation was
to influence people,” he said. “To give them a different kind of
thought, a different kind of mind.”

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 When we spoke in autumn 2013, he had grown the site to about
two million users and was receiving significant interest from
investors. Shi wanted to capitalize on the endless opportunities
available in China’s Internet, which at the time had nearly 700
million users and growing. But there were still a lot of worries.
Some were cultural. Although he had lived his life entirely in
China, Shi felt that his level of objectivity—his ability to stand back
and view things from a detached perspective—made him an
aberration in his own country. He added that his style of expression
was unusual: “I’m very straightforward, but Chinese usually use
indirect ways to express themselves.”
At a more practical level, he worried about the legal landscape
for his business. “We don’t have a well-developed law system, so
many competitors are kind of illegal,” he said. “If they try to copy
your ideas, the law may not protect you.”
His larger fears, however, were political. Shi worried about trying
to grow a business in an environment that could quickly become
unstable. He had lived in an era of peace and stability, but he knew
from his family’s previous generations how unpredictable Chinese
politics could be. Most of all, he worried that he would be forced to
change his vision. “If you do any cultural stuff or music, then you’re
going to be watched by Big Brother,” he said. “Just like if you make
films, you have to get censored. My biggest concern is whether I can
keep going and still be myself.”
These are common concerns among Chinese entrepreneurs, and
they dissuade many from pursuing private entrepreneurship in the
first place. Though the private sector has come to dominate China’s
economy (accounting for roughly 80 percent of industrial output by
2014),[7] state-owned enterprises remain very powerful. For private
startups, entering territory where these behemoths graze is an
intimidating prospect. Small-time entrepreneurs like Shi Kaiwen
worry that once they put a good idea out there, a state-owned
competitor will snatch it up and use its considerably greater
resources to develop that idea. If the rival breaks the law by doing
so, there is little faith that government arbitrators will act impartially
in a conflict between their state-owned brethren and an obscure
startup.
One cautionary tale came in 2013 when mobile apps allowing
people to electronically hail taxis started becoming popular in
several major cities. Their efficiency was a hit with passengers and
drivers alike, but local government interests saw a threat. There was
talk of the apps destabilizing the industry, and some wondered why
big (mostly state-owned) taxi companies would even be necessary if
drivers could so easily be managed electronically. Some cities, like

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Bei​jing, instituted regulations favoring latecomer state-owned taxi
apps, thereby putting several private startups out of business. The
Shenzhen transportation authority responded by banning the apps
altogether.[8]
Unpredictability is bad for business, but politics may be
hindering Chinese innovation and entrepreneurship in an even more
fundamental way. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama has described
the critical role of social trust in a developing country’s economic
transition. According to his theory, trust gives people a high degree
of “spontaneous sociability,” allowing them to form strong
relationships outside the family, build large companies, and
collaborate to stay at the forefront of industrial innovation. If a
nation lacks this basic level of trust, then innovation stagnates and
economic growth plateaus.[9]
A 2012 study by the Institute of Sociology within the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences found that the general trust level in
China had fallen more than three percentage points in just two
years. Less than half of the people surveyed for the study agreed
that “most people can be trusted.” Only about 30 percent said that
they trust strangers.[10]
A decade earlier, a paper entitled “How Political Institutions
Create and Destroy Social Capital” aptly articulated the most
common root of this mistrust. “A deteriorating, biased, corrupt
administrative system in general goes hand in hand with low levels
of social capital, particularly when measured as generalized trust,”
its authors concluded.[11]

Professor Steven White, who teaches aspiring young
businesspeople at Tsinghua University’s Department of Innovation,
Entrepreneurship and Strategy, said that China’s administrative
weaknesses are just one of many factors hindering the innovative
drive of young Chinese. He explained that his students consistently
approach class activities, such as simulated negotiations, with an
“eat or be eaten” mentality. They refuse to give up any information
for fear of making themselves vulnerable, and they show little or no
guilt about having to cheat to get ahead. White’s real-world
observations have shown the same tendencies; he noted that
cheaters have a sense of shame only if they get caught. “There are
also elements of cohesion and loyalty, but that’s the exception
here,” White said. “The rule seems to be you get ahead, and using
others is part of getting ahead. It’s very antithetical. Innovation
emerges from trust-based collaboration.”[12]
White tells his students a simple story to illustrate the

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widespread fear of thinking outside the box and challenging
authority. In the story, a shopkeeper tells his two assistants to
complete a task in a way that they both know will not work. One
assistant adjusts the instructions and succeeds, while the other
follows orders precisely and fails. The shopkeeper berates the one
who failed and commends the one who succeeded, but later quietly
fires the latter for not directly obeying orders.
“You can see that kind of obedience to authority [in China]; even
when you shouldn’t,” White said. “It really goes through their heads.
You never come up with your own ideas, and if your boss asks you
to, it’s a trap. I can’t really say what I think the best idea is unless I
know that’s exactly what my boss wants.”
This pattern of thinking in China likely stretches back far before
Communism. With an enormous population and limited resources,
the country has always been a scarcity society. Competition over
resources has frequently been a life-or-death struggle, making
misplaced trust or unnecessary risk potentially catastrophic. Couple
this social culture with a political environment hostile to risk taking
and innovative endeavors, and you have a difficult combination to
overcome.
A 2013 survey of engineering students at top universities in the
United States and China sought to compare attitudes toward
startups among young would-be innovators in the two countries. It
found that most students in both nations were interested in starting
their own company. However, only 3 percent of the Chinese
respondents actually planned to do so, compared to 22 percent in
the United States. On the flip side, 52 percent of the Chinese wanted
to work in government, compared to just 5 percent of Americans.[13]
The uninviting atmosphere for innovation has led to what even
Chinese state media have dubbed the world’s worst “brain drain.”
According to government figures, of the 2.64 million Chinese who left
the country to study abroad between 1978 and 2012, only 41
percent returned.[14]
Factors contributing to the brain drain are numerous, ranging
from environmental issues to educational opportunities. There also
tend to be better facilities and support circles for research in the
West. China is trying to improve its standing in these areas, but
there is one big area where it seems to be moving backward: the
Internet.
One does not have to stay in China long before getting frustrated
with its Internet. The “Great Firewall” censorship system blocks
popular foreign sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, key
resources that people in many different fields use to communicate

117
with one another around the world. Even less sensitive collaboration
sites like Git​Hub, Source​Forge, and Linked​In have also been
periodically blocked, as have several major foreign news sites. And
even if one has no need for these resources, Internet processing is
slower because of the Great Firewall. This hindrance to efficiency and
international collaboration gives China a gaping disadvantage in the
information technology industry, where most of the hope for future
innovation lies.
Students at prestigious Peking University, whom the government
is particularly concerned with keeping in line, face even tighter
restrictions. Their campus Internet subscription limits them
exclusively to domestic sites unless they are willing to shell out
twelve times the normal fee in order to use foreign sites that the rest
of China already has access to. Most students opt to save their
money.[15]
At neighboring Tsinghua University, Steven White worries about
what China’s broken political atmosphere is doing to his best
students. “There are two groups, broadly,” he says. “One says that
the system is bad, but there’s not much hope to change it, so sooner
or later they’re going to try finding ways to get away from it. The
other group seems to say ‘that’s the game.’ You figure out how to
play and make loads of money.”
“For me, the worrying part is that there’s a non-randomness to
who’s leaving,” White continued. “Those coming out of a place like
Tsinghua or Peking University have the potential to be influential in
society. But if those who see the need for change are doing as much
as possible to leave the system or distance themselves from it rather
than become actors of positive change, you’re left with a lot of
people trying to work the system the way it is, which reinforces it.
Extrapolate that out, and it’s not very positive.”
Vivek Wadhwa, vice president of research and innovation at
Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, agrees that this kind of
political environment is incompatible with innovation. At a debate
hosted by The Economist in 2012, he said that innovators have to
challenge authority, break the rules, and take risks. “You can’t do
that in China,” he continued. “If you do, you’re going to be put away
unless you happen to be part of the Communist government, in
which case you have subsidies and the entire system is rigged in
your favor. But also you’re relying upon stolen technology. That ain’t
innovation.”[16]
Wadhwa added that China is investing massively in attempts to
be innovative, but the results have been akin to “throwing a
thousand monkeys” at a problem and getting a small innovation by

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mistake. He said the only people who believe China is going to
become a world leader in innovation are book authors and venture
capitalists who can bank on government subsidies.

Steve Bell is one venture capitalist who begs to differ. The
shaved-headed New Yorker started coming to China in 2002 to sell
software. Over the next several years he became so impressed with
the country’s young entrepreneurs that he decided to put all his
eggs in their basket, forming Trilogy Venture Capital with the aim of
funding young Chinese startups. “They’re very cost-effective,” Bell
told me while eating in a trendy Bei​jing café. “I can invest in ten
young Chinese startup teams for the cost of one in the US.”[17]
His strategy involves traveling to meet students through startup
salons and at talks by successful entrepreneurs. But his activity that
yields the biggest results is ChinaStars, a three-day competition
where teams of students must create and present a new product.
The winners get thousands of yuan in investment and continued
guidance from Bell in order to develop it. When we spoke in early
2014, he had held nearly a hundred of these events, which had
yielded some fifty active investments. About a dozen of them had
already paid off, including a dating app and a video game. Bell is
convinced that within a decade or so, a student-founded game
changer like Facebook or Google will emerge from China.
“The thing going for tech students in China is nobody believes in
them except very few of us,” Bell said. “In the US, at Stanford, MIT,
or any top school, there are five hundred good investors competing
with me. The amount of competition [for me] as an early-stage
investor in startups focusing on Chinese students is basically none at
all.”
Over the past decade, Bell has seen Bei​jing’s startup community
blossom while benefiting from a rapidly growing middle class.
Millions across the country continue to urbanize, stepping off the
farms and into cities that offer a brand-new world of purchasing
opportunities. Consumption from urban Chinese households is
projected to grow from 10 trillion yuan ($1.56 trillion) in 2012 to
nearly 27 trillion yuan ($4.3 trillion) by 2022.[18]
The generation spending all this new money is also the one
primed to create new products to spend it on. Steve Bell concedes
that enormous educational, cultural, and political barriers currently
constrain the country’s ability to innovate, but he sees them as
speed bumps rather than road blocks. With a little time, he believes,
they will be overcome just as they were in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.
“I think the Western media paints a very one-sided, sometimes

119
ignorant picture of China,” he said. “The only people who say that
China doesn’t innovate are the people who haven’t been here,
because there’s a ton of innovation happening in every area.”
Bell prefers investing in young people because they are not
constrained by families, jobs, or a knowledge of what has not worked
previously. In China, there is still usually a reluctance to deviate from
the prescribed path of getting a degree and then a job, but he is
starting to see more young people recognize that shifting toward
their own pursuits is not as foolish as they were taught. “Ask a group
of Chinese students what the biggest most important startups in the
last thirty years are and they yell out Microsoft, Facebook, and
Apple,” he said. “The first things that come to their mouths every
time were all started by dropouts.”

One of the entrepreneurs to receive Bell’s money was twenty-
two-year-old Jerry Yue. The Xi’an native had always been a bit ahead
of the curve, getting admitted to a top college at age fifteen. A year
before that, he had started developing software that allowed
teachers, students, and parents to communicate about classwork on
an online platform. By age sixteen he began attracting investment in
his idea and poured himself into it, neglecting his studies in the
process. His grades sank and he did what was once unthinkable for a
Chinese student: he dropped out.
Yue subsequently went to a lesser university and sold the
company he was developing, but then he dropped out again. He said
one major reason was that he could not focus on his classwork when
he had the constant urge to create something new of his own. “We
already have a huge ball of jobs in existing industries,” he said. “The
only thing that pushes us forward is to make something outside that
ball.”
Yue may appear a shining example of Chinese entrepreneurship,
but there is one hitch in the story: the colleges he attended were
Stanford and the University of Illinois. His parents, both academic
researchers, had lived and worked in the United States, so they knew
the value of a Western education. They sent Yue to the United States
for high school and encouraged him to stay there for college. “I’ve
been through both education systems,” Yue said. “They are very,
very different. In China there’s no way to interact; it’s just like a
factory. The only way you can interact with the teacher is to answer
questions, and there’s only one answer.”
Returning overseas students like Yue, colloquially known as
haigui (sea turtles), represent China’s hope for stemming its brain
drain. The country’s potentially gigantic market, with fewer skilled
competitors than the West, has drawn many native innovators with

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Western ideas and skills back to their homeland. Those ideas, in
turn, are being passed on to locally educated Chinese. Since
returning home, Yue has taken a personal interest in cultivating
entrepreneurial youth who were educated entirely in China. He has
continued to develop software companies and recruited young,
indigenous standouts to help him.
On a cold Bei​jing morning in early 2014, I attended a meeting
that Yue hosted at a Bei​jing television station with eleven post-90s
entrepreneurs. The young students, most of whom had taken a year-
long break from their studies to work with Yue, had all designed
software. One student’s product, an electronic magnet that tracked
food in a user’s refrigerator, neatly complemented another student’s
grocery-
ordering app.
The purpose of the meeting was to design an upcoming reality
TV show starring a famous real-estate magnate. Viewers would
interact with the host and the show through a mobile app as they
viewed descriptions of the students’ products.
Yue, with his spiked hair and a small goatee, led the meeting
wearing sweatpants, sandals, and a T-shirt while casually eating his
breakfast. The students shouted out ideas and took copious notes on
how they might engineer the show’s software. “There are very few
independent thinkers in China, so [these students] are very
different,” Yue told me afterward.
He said he selects the students because their values differ
markedly from those of most young Chinese, in many cases because
their parents have supported their unconventional pursuits. Most of
them come from second-tier universities, since those from the very
best schools tend to show little interest in entrepreneurial thinking.
“The culture here has decided that all the talented people in China
want to go to a huge corporation,” Yue said. “Our parents have been
through a lot of unstable times. They’ve starved, so they teach us
that the most important thing is stability—having a stable job.”
Do Jerry Yue and Shi Kaiwen represent an emerging trend of
young entrepreneurial risk takers in China, or are they simply among
a small group of outliers who will not meaningfully impact the
economy? The answer is uncertain. While hugely optimistic, Steve
Bell conceded that his investment strategy depends on the “law of
large numbers” and on his ability to pluck a few standouts from an
enormous pool. “There’s a whole cultural bias against innovation and
creativity throughout society in China; the fear of failure is very
different,” Bell said. “There’s not a startup culture yet, but there will
be.”
Jerry Yue agreed, citing the rapidly improving resources for

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Chinese startups. He told the story of a sixteen-year-old engineering
student who quickly created a self-heating coffee mug with a 3D
printer. “I was smart but we just didn’t have these tools back in my
day,” the twenty-two-year-old said without a trace of irony. “It’s
really neat how people can innovate nowadays.”
Even if China’s current crop of young entrepreneurs is just a
small pool of outliers, the pool is likely to get much bigger. The
further young people and their parents are removed from the social
taboos and rigid thinking of Mao’s era, the more they are branching
out into individualistic pursuits and unconventional ways of thinking.
The government is encouraging strategic innovation with residency
benefits, cheap office space, subsidies, and cash grants. And while
there has been little movement in easing political constraints, plenty
of young thinkers seem to be working around them just fine.
Shi Kaiwen, like many Chinese entrepreneurs, points to Steve
Jobs as his greatest inspiration. The Apple founder was put up for
adoption as a baby and was later viewed as a goof-off by teachers
due to his disinterest in formal schooling. A college dropout by age
eighteen, he taught himself the skills that would later help him to
found one of the world’s most recognizable companies. “It’s not only
about his success,” Shi said. “He was a weird person according to
society. He had personality problems. Most Chinese startups find him
very inspiring. If you’re not recognized by society now, don’t give
up.”
Jobs’s story is well known and admired in China. After his death
in 2011, tributes were posted throughout the country and the first
250,000 prints of his translated biography sold out in less than a day.
[19] At the time, Chinese pondered what it would take to produce a

Steve Jobs of their own. “Of course you’re restricted by society, but
at least your mind shouldn’t be restricted,” Shi concluded.
Shi added that he will not be constrained by Xi Jinping’s narrow
vision of “the Chinese dream,” but will live out his dream on his own
terms. “There is innovative and inspiring thinking here; and we do
have hippies in China,” he laughed. “We want the outside world to
know that we’re trying to change the direction of this country.”
1. Yikai, Wang. “Will China Escape the Middle-Income Trap? A
Politico-economic Theory of Growth and State Capitalism.” University
of Zurich (Job Market Paper), (2013): 34.
2. Xinhua. “Youth Urged to Contribute to Realization of ‘Chinese
Dream.’” May 4, 2013. Accessed May 14, 2014.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013–
05/04/c_132359537.htm.
3. Cohen, David. “Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream.” The Diplomat,
December 12, 2012. Accessed May 12, 2014.

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http://thediplomat.com/2012/12/xi-jinpings-chinese-dream/.
4. Shi, Yuzhi. “” [Seven Reasons Why the Chinese Dream Is
Different from the American Dream]. Seeking Truth. Central Party
School/Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. May 20,
2013. Accessed June 9, 2013.
http://www.qstheory.cn/zz/zgtsshzyll/201305/t20130520_232259.htm.
5. Flannery, Russell. “Forbes China 30 Under 30: Meet 30 Young
Entrepreneurial Disruptors in China.” Forbes, March 11, 2013.
Accessed October 18, 2014.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/russellflannery/2013/03/11/forbes-china-
30-under-30-meet-30-young-entrepreneural-disruptors-in-china/.
6. Shi, Kaiwen. Interview by author, Bei​jing, September 2013.
7. Lardy, Nicholas R. Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private Business
in China. Institute for International Economics, 2014.
8. Zhang, Chunwei. “APP” [Guru Taxi App]. Economic Observer, May
31, 2013, 41.
9. Fukuyama, Francis. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of
Prosperity. New York: Free Press, 1995.
10. Wang, Junxiu, and Yiyin Yang. (2012–2013) [Blue Book of
Social Mentality Annual Report on Social Mentality of China (2012–
2013)]. Bei​jing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2013.
11. Rothstein, Bo, and Dietlind Stolle. “How Political Institutions
Create and Destroy Social Capital: An Institutional Theory of
Generalized Trust.” Paper prepared for the 98th Meeting of the
American Political Science Association, Boston, 2002.
12. White, Steve. Interview by author, Bei​jing, January 2014.
13. Zhang, Linxiu, Eli Pollak, Ross Darwin, Mathew Boswell, and Scott
Rozelle. “Are Elite University Graduates Aiding China’s Transition to
an Innovation-based Economy? Results from a Career Choices
Survey among Would-be Innovators in China and the USA.” Asia-
Pacific Journal of Accounting and Economics, no. 1 (2013): 58–69.
14. “China Becomes Largest Source of Overseas Students.” Xinhua
(Bei​jing), August 3, 2013. Accessed May 15, 2014.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013-
08/03/content_16868063.htm.
15. Bao, Beibei. “How Internet Censorship Is Curbing Innovation in
China.” The Atlantic, April 22, 2013. Accessed October 18, 2014.
http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/how-internet-
censorship-is-curbing-innovation-in-china/275188/?
single_page=true.
16. The Economist. “Vivek Wadhwa: Chinese Innovation Is a ‘Giant
Scam.’” FORA.tv, 2012. Accessed May 15, 2014.
http://fora.tv/2012/03/28/An_Economist-
Style_Debate_on_Global_Innovation/Vivek_Wadhwa_Chinese_Innovation_is_a_Gia

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17. Bell, Steve. Interview by author, Bei​jing, January 2014.
18. “Chinese Consumers: Doing It Their Way.” The Economist,
January 25, 2014. Accessed May 15, 2014.
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21595019-market-growing-
furiously-getting-tougher-foreign-firms-doing-it-their-way.
19. “Steve Jobs Biography Sells Out in China.” Silicon Republic,
October 27, 2011. Accessed May 23, 2014.
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/digital-life/item/24246-steve-jobs-
biography-sells.

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 III
Coping

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 Chapter 9
The Leftovers
Every weekend in Shanghai, hundreds of people descend upon
People’s Square to trade in the city’s biggest market: the marriage
market, that is.
Umbrellas propped up on their sides in neat lines contain pieces
of paper listing the vital statistics of marriage candidates: age,
height, education level, job, salary, and workplace. An interested
suitor can simply call the number listed at the bottom.
But the eligible bachelors and bachelorettes themselves are
rarely present at the market. In fact, there is a good chance that
they are opposed to the whole thing. The market is almost
exclusively attended by parents, desperate to set up their children.
“She’s just not trying,” one mother complains about her
daughter’s lack of determination in searching for a husband. “She
has a good education and is very beautiful,” says another, seeking to
persuade the mom of a young man that her daughter would be a
good match.
The candidates advertised at the market are overwhelmingly
female, reflecting the panic that urban Chinese parents feel when a
daughter reaches her late twenties without a man. In their eyes, as
soon as she crosses the threshold into her thirties, she will be
undesirable and thus doomed to die childless and alone, a “leftover
woman” (shengnü).

Parents at People’s Park in Shanghai put their children’s vital stats atop
umbrellas, hoping to find them a marriage partner.
(Photo: Eric Fish)
Kathy, a twenty-eight-year-old Shenyang native, hears this
refrain constantly—from her friends, family, the media, and pretty
much everyone else in society. “I don’t mind,” she laughed. “I

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sometimes tease myself and other girlfriends, saying that we’re
leftovers.”[1]
When we met at an upscale Beijing Thai restaurant, she spoke
confidently in colloquial English. With her smooth short hair, milky
skin, and wide smile she resembled Courtney Cox. A researcher for a
prestigious foreign media bureau in Beijing, she is the product of
China’s top journalism college and holds a master’s degree from
England.
With this background, one might consider Kathy a catch. But that
is not necessarily how she has been perceived on the dating scene.
She broke up with her first boyfriend, a Chinese man she met in
England, after failing to reach a compromise on where they would
live. He wanted her to follow him as he racked up degrees around
Europe, which would have effectively delayed her foray into
journalism for several years. She could not accept it.
Her second relationship, with a businessman six years her
senior, ended similarly when he expected her to move to his
hometown near Shanghai, thus cutting off her blossoming career in
Beijing. “I think that’s not respectful,” Kathy said. “He just decided
that’s what he wants and lectured me about how a man thinks of
women.”
Kathy recalled the man declaring that he would still be regarded
as charming well into his late thirties, and that since he was rich, he
could basically have any woman he wanted. “Why should I marry
someone over twenty-eight? They’re leftovers,” he asked
rhetorically.
“He told me I should settle down,” Kathy recalled bitterly. “‘Don’t
just play around wasting time. It’s time for you to have a family.’ He
actually said that.”
Undoubtedly many women like Kathy become frustrated when
men expect them to take a backseat to the man’s career aspirations.
This may be one reason why 55 percent of university-educated
Chinese men choose to marry a less educated spouse (compared to
32 percent of university-educated women).[2]
After she broke up with her second boyfriend, Kathy’s family
started getting worried. They were attending a steady stream of
weddings and baby showers for her childhood friends. Much to their
social chagrin, they had to deflect questions about their daughter
reaching the ripe old age of twenty-seven with no spouse and no
prospects.
Some of the marriages, however, occurred largely because aging
women caved to social pressure. Kathy recalled one twenty-eight-
year-old girlfriend who was unhappily single. As the peer pressure

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and family prodding became unbearable, she decided that she would
marry by age twenty-nine and have a baby by thirty—no matter
what. “Everything was just arranged very, very neatly,” Kathy said.
“She set up a very busy schedule, meeting three guys each week.”
This woman had just three requirements for her husband: he
needed to have a stable job and income, be well-educated, and care
about her more than himself (this last requirement was flexible).
After rapid-fire setups and tireless browsing on dating sites, she
found a man who earned all three check marks. Within six months
they were married. On their wedding night, the man asked if she
actually loved him. “I’m not really sure,” she replied, to which he
said, “I’ll show you I’m worthy of marrying you.”
Kathy laughed as she related the story. “It’s like they’re dating
after getting married,” she said.

This urgent sense of desperation to marry is hardly unique to
China, which has a tradition of early marriages that goes back to
antiquity. But part of the stigma attached to educated, unmarried
Chinese women can likely be traced to a 2007 campaign launched
by none other than the government’s official feminist organization,
the All-China Women’s Federation. That group popularized the term
“leftover women” and even divided them into categories based on
age and chances of marriage: those age twenty-five to twenty-seven
still have a fighting chance, but things get tough thereafter and
downright dismal at thirty.
The campaign manifested itself in state media articles belittling
leftover women. One Women’s Federation piece from 2011 warned
“average-looking” or “ugly” girls who might try to increase their
competitiveness through higher education that “as women age, they
are worth less and less, so by the time they get their MA or PhD,
they are already old, like yellowed pearls.” A separate Xinhua
column proclaimed that most leftover women do not deserve
sympathy because they squander their youth “going to nightclubs in
search of a one-night stand, or they become the mistress of a high
official or rich man.”[3]
Leta Hong Fincher, who was the first to bring wide attention to
these articles, argues in her book Leftover Women that the campaign
has been remarkably effective in convincing women that their clock
is ticking and that they should rush into marriage regardless of the
excessive personal and financial compromises it entails.[4]
Anyone acquainted with educated, urban Chinese women would
likely recognize the effect. After I finished teaching in Nanjing, I kept
in touch with three graduating female students who were also

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moving to the capital. Their attitudes toward marriage evolved
almost exactly as the leftover woman campaign hinted. Between
ages twenty-two and twenty-five, they aggressively went on blind
dates with one man after another. At that point, they had high
standards. For one girl, Sara, the man needed a Beijing hukou, a
salary of 15,000 yuan per month, and a height of at least 1.8 meters
(5’11”) before she would agree to meet him.
But by the time age twenty-five rolled around without a mate, a
sort of hysteria took hold. The families became unrelenting in their
pressure. Sara, who was living with her parents, quietly snuck into
the house when she got home so she could avoid her mother at all
costs. She had been given strict instructions to find a husband within
one year, and each day brought renewed interrogations about her
dating tactics.
After the girls turned twenty-six, two of them underwent plastic
surgery—one to erase facial blemishes and one for trendy Western-
looking double eyelids. Before they reached twenty-seven, their
standards fell precipitously. Sara dropped the hukou requirement and
lowered the salary expectation, settling on a man of satisfactory
height with whom she got along well enough. At the time of writing,
the other two were still desperately hounding everyone they knew to
introduce single male friends to them.
Kathy, meanwhile, was still resilient and able to deflect her
family’s pressure. “If I’m looking for a job or trying to get a high
score on an exam, I know what I should do,” she said. “But that’s not
how it should work in a relationship. If you rush it, that will end very
badly.”
She had trouble convincing the men she encountered to hold the
same progressive attitude. The third man with whom she got
involved, nine years her senior, decided at the end of their first date
that they should get married. The wisdom of his thirty-six years, he
explained, made him certain that she was the one. And besides, he
was getting tired of going out on dates.
A man whom Kathy met at a speed dating event informed her on
their first formal date that his mom was bugging him to get married
so he could deliver her a grandchild as soon as possible. “I thought
‘wow, you really moved to the next step,’” Kathy laughed about the
date. “It’s not about you and me at all. It’s about a child.”

Kathy, patient about making commitments and resistant to
pressure from family, may be in the minority among her peers, but
she is hardly alone in China. Chinese women, focusing more heavily
on education and careers as the economy has developed, have
followed the global trend of marrying later. Between 2000 and 2010,

129
the average age of first marriage for Chinese women rose from 23.4
years to nearly 25.[5] In cosmopolitan Shanghai, women are now
waiting until over 30 on average, defying the leftover label en masse
(much to the dismay of the parents at People’s Square).[6]
One might expect a government that came to power promising
liberation and equality for women to embrace this trend. Instead it
has reverted back to patriarchal policies and put forward the
patronizing leftover woman campaign.
Part of the reason lies with Mr. Yang in a village outside
Huanghua, Shandong. When I passed through this small farming
community on a bike trip, it was brimming with activity. It was
October, the harvest season, and the surrounding fields were full of
corn ripe for the picking. Farmers uprooted it, husked it, ground it,
and raked the kernels onto the road to dry.
Yang’s home had a sign advertising rooms for just 10 yuan
($1.59) per night—a deal too good to pass up. When I approached,
Yang was outside with several male cousins, feeding cobs of corn
into a husking machine and loading them onto a small pickup truck.
In any Chinese city, one of the easiest ways to understand what
local governments are worried about is to look at the propaganda. In
this village (and almost every one that I rode through in Shandong)
the message was crystal clear.
“Give fewer and better births, be happy the whole life,” read one
message in blue paint on the side of a shop. “Delivering girls is just
as good as delivering boys. Girls are descendants too,” said another
outside a pharmacy. On the wall surrounding Yang’s farm, the local
government had spray-painted in big bold characters: “Today’s girls
are the builders of tomorrow.” Around the corner, a placard got
straight to the point: “Ban nonmedical sex determinations and sex-
selective abortions.”

“Having boys is the same as having girls. Delivering less leads to fortune and

130
happy music.” One child/anti-sex-selective abortion propaganda in a rural
Anhui province village.
(Photo: Eric Fish)
These signs and hundreds like them were conspiring to hammer
home a simple message: obey the birth limits and do not abort girls.
But the people, it seems, have not been receptive to that message.
Due to a lethal combination of the one-child policy, accessible
ultrasounds, cheap abortions, and a traditional patriarchal culture
that prefers sons over daughters, China has the world’s largest
gender imbalance, with 117 boys born for every 100 girls. The
problem supposedly peaked in 2008 with a national birth ratio of 120
to 100, which has been declining slightly since then, according to
government figures.[7] But even if that decline continues, a
generation of damage has already been done. A surplus of roughly
one million Chinese men enters the marriage market each year. The
number of Chinese men age twenty to forty-nine who are destined to
live a life of bachelorhood is projected to surpass 20 million in 2015
and grow beyond 40 million by 2040.[8]
Yang was twenty-six years old and muscular, with a middle-
school education and sun-glazed skin. He had worked around
Shandong as a migrant construction worker, helping to put up
massive residential complexes that dotted urban areas. But lately
the jobs had dried up, pushing him back onto the farm to wait out
the dry spell. His family had diversified beyond agriculture, putting
up the small inn and a restaurant for those passing through town.
But the income was still a far cry from even the modest construction
pay.
I ordered dinner and started chatting with Yang, asking questions
that he clearly found a bit silly. After discussing his background and
work on the farm, I jumped a bit brusquely into a question about his
love life. “I’ve never had a girlfriend,” he laughed.[9] Nor had most of
his cousins or peers, for that matter.
Looking around town, it was not hard to see why. Most of the
women who lived there were in their forties or older, and already
taken. The few younger women with whom I spoke to were mostly
home for a short visit or to lend a hand in the harvest, and they were
taken as well.
China’s gender imbalance has led to a particularly harsh reality
in rural areas. The low supply of females means that a woman can
be very selective in choosing a spouse, usually marrying a man who
can improve her socioeconomic status and leave a sizable bride
price (reverse dowry) for her family. Therefore, women in the poorest
villages marry up into more comfortable areas. Unfortunately, for the
men like Yang who are left behind in the most secluded and poor

131
villages, there simply are not any women left.[10]
Whether Yang earned several hundred yuan each month on the
farm or a few thousand by doing migrant work, his chances of
attracting a mate appeared bleak. Saving up for a bride price, which
can run into the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of
yuan, would be hard enough. Yang hardly had a prayer of ever
affording one of the urban homes that he had helped to build. In all
likelihood, he would be among the one in five Chinese men
consigned to the status of “bare branch” (guanggun)—unable to
continue his family line.
Men a bit higher up the socioeconomic food chain do not have it
easy either. This became apparent in the Jiangsu port city of
Lianyungang, which has an urban population of seven hundred
thousand and the distinction of being China’s most gender
imbalanced city, with 163 boys for every 100 girls under age five.[11]
I visited a high-end nightclub there where the cheapest drink
was a $7 Budweiser. It was an interesting mix of well-off
professionals, carefree fu’erdai (second-generation rich), and about a
dozen tall young women milling about in leggy evening gowns. I
would later learn that these ladies were not looking for exactly what I
first assumed; rather, the club had hired them to mingle and
schmooze patrons into buying more drinks—though if it was
anything like most similar clubs, everything has its price.
As soon as I entered, I was enthusiastically greeted by Zhou Kai,
the club’s chubby twenty-two-year-old assistant manager. He led me
to his table and offered me a beer. After the standard probing about
my nationality and length of stay in China, he asked bluntly, “How
many girlfriends do you have?”
“Just one,” I laughed. But he would return to this question
several times throughout our conversation, apparently unwilling to
believe that a Western (and presumably wealthy) man would settle
for just one woman. I asked in turn how many he had, to which he
just shook his head and waved me off with his lit cigarette.
“You have all these beautiful girls hanging around,” I pushed.
“Surely you’ve dated one.”
“No, no, no,” he replied. “They don’t want me.”
He took another puff of his cigarette and pointed to a balding,
middle-aged man sitting in the corner with a hostess. “He probably
makes more than 50,000 yuan per month,” Zhou said. “I make
3,000. They’ll be his second or third girlfriend before they’ll be my
first.”
“I guess we’re both just diaosi,” I said in a pathetic attempt at
solidarity. He smirked and clinked his beer to mine. “How many

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girlfriends do you really have?”
Diaosi has become a popular term in China. Crudely translating
to “penis hair,” it migrated from its origin in online forums in 2010 as
a self-deprecating label for unattractive men from humble
backgrounds with no house or car. Contrary to their tall, rich, and
handsome (gaofushuai) counterparts, they yearn for a beautiful lover
but lack the confidence to pursue one. Unable to make a name for
themselves in China’s hypermaterialistic society, they escape into
fruitless hobbies like video games. (Diaosi has subsequently evolved
into a more encompassing term for self-identified societal losers of
both genders who feel stuck in dead-end lives.)
Diaosi is a funny word with a very serious underlying problem.
For the foreseeable future, one of every five Chinese men will be
denied the fundamental human desire for a lover and offspring.
Experts are expecting very little good to come from this situation.

In her book Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and
the Consequences of a World Full of Men, Science magazine writer
Mara Hvistendahl put it bluntly: “Historically, societies in which men
substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live. Often
they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent.”[12]
Studies have shown a compelling correlation between
testosterone levels and aggression, and young, single men have the
highest testosterone levels. A 1998 study carried out by Syracuse
University researchers explained that single men spend more time in
the company of other males. This association tends to expose them
to more confrontations with other men, which in turn boosts their
testosterone further.[13] Unmarried men between twenty-four and
thirty-five years old are thus three times more likely to kill another
male than married men in the same age bracket. They are also more
likely to steal, rob, rape, engage in substance abuse, and take risks
involved in acquiring the resources needed to attract women.[14]
China is already starting to feel the same effects. One study
found that from 1988 to 2004, every 1 percent increase in China’s
gender imbalance resulted in a 3.7 percent increase in violent and
property crime.[15]
Even without these studies, history provides ample evidence of
the same tendency. From ancient Athens to the American Wild West,
places with severe male surpluses have been lawless and violent.
China’s own history gives a glimpse of the upheaval that restless
“bare branches” can spark.
In the nineteenth century, the country experienced relentless
cycles of drought, floods, and famine. Due to the dwindling resources

133
and the rigid patriarchal culture, many families began selectively
neglecting or outright murdering their young daughters, thereby
creating gender imbalances as high as 129 men for every 100
women in some areas. When the surplus bare branches grew up,
they were easily recruited into militias or gangs of roving bandits
that would coalesce into larger rebellions. Occupying foreigners, as
well as corrupt Qing dynasty mandarins with their harems of
concubines, made appealing targets for the pent-up angst of these
men. This pattern manifested itself in the Nien Rebellion, the Black
Flag Army, the Boxers, the Eight Trigrams Uprising, and the deadliest
of them all—the Taiping Rebellion with its 20 million casualties.[16]
In this context, one can understand a little better why the
Chinese government is urging women to put marriage ahead of
education or professional goals. An edgy Communist Party wants to
deploy every available woman to mitigate what could turn into
widespread instability.
The danger could even spill over China’s borders. Scholars
Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boar warn in their book Bare
Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population
that governments presiding over large male surpluses tend to co-opt
bare branches through nationalistic pandering, which results in “a
swaggering, belligerent, provocative” foreign policy.[17] Remember
Cai Yang, whom we saw bludgeoning a Toyota driver during the 2012
anti-Japan protests? He was a bare branch.
In 2012, amid a Beijing crackdown on foreigners who lacked
proper visas, one famous CCTV anchor played on a resentment of
foreigners dating Chinese women. “The Public Security Bureau wants
to clean out the foreign trash: To arrest foreign thugs and protect
innocent girls,” the anchor, Yang Rui, wrote on his Weibo account.
“Foreign spies seek out Chinese girls to mask their espionage and
pretend to be tourists while compiling maps and GPS data for Japan,
Korea and the West.”[18]
Plenty of Chinese derided the comments as ignorant and
harkening back to the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, wherein the
indiscriminate massacre of foreigners in northern China prompted a
retaliatory invasion by eight nations. But Yang also had plenty of
supporters. With the growing number of expatriates living in China
coupled with the widening gender imbalance, the topic of foreign
men dating Chinese women is polarizing.
The relatively small (but very visible) number of foreign men
sweeping up Chinese women only adds to the sense of crisis for
Chinese men in the marriage market. Their desperation has led them
to ferociously pursue capital and assets in order to make themselves

134
more attractive to potential wives. In China, financial considerations
still weigh very heavily in marital matchups. In rural areas, a man’s
family often has to pay eight to twenty times their annual household
income for costs associated with his marriage, including the
wedding, bride price, and new house.[19] Men who do not own a
house are less likely to ever marry.[20]
In most countries this may not be an insurmountable challenge,
but for Chinese men it can seem all but impossible. In 2014, the
average Chinese home cost twenty-six years’ worth of the average
income, compared to eight years of income in Japan and just two in
the United States. In Beijing, the average home cost was an
incredible thirty-three times the average salary.[21] The financial
markets were largely responsible for this imbalance. China’s stock
market is widely seen as a rigged roller coaster (less than 9 percent
of Chinese own shares[22]), and the government has for years
pushed bank interest rates artificially low—usually lower than the
inflation rate—in a move to fuel economic growth through cheap
capital. Real estate has thus remained the only consistently reliable
investment. Rampant speculation, driven by wealthy investors
buying dozens or even hundreds of homes at a time, has left China
with some of the highest housing costs in the world.
For young status-conscious Chinese, home ownership is a
symbol of arrival to the middle class. For single men, it is often
viewed as the baseline for adequacy in the marriage market. So
saving up for a down payment can become an all-out effort for a
man and his family. A 2009 study for the US-based National Bureau
of Economic Research estimated that, during the years immediately
preceding the study, the gender imbalance had accounted for 18
percent of the rise in urban savings rates and a whopping 68 percent
in rural areas.[23]
Even if a woman decides to throw material concerns to the wind
and marry based on love alone, that does not necessarily mean her
family will sign off on the arrangement. One of my female friends
from east China decided to marry her high school sweetheart after
dating him for five years, even though his family was far less affluent
than hers. From the moment they announced their engagement,
there was conflict between the two sides. In a serious break with
local tradition, her parents insisted on walking out first at the
wedding (since they had paid for it), which caused a major loss of
face for the man’s parents. Then there was bitterness over the fact
that the man’s family could pay only a small token bride price to her
family and could not contribute a fair share of the down payment for
the couple’s home. The family tensions eventually became

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overwhelming and within several months of the wedding the couple
divorced.
Given the skyrocketing housing prices, purchases are
increasingly requiring a joint effort by the husband, wife, and both
families. Unfortunately for the woman, she will usually get the short
end of the stick if the marriage ends in divorce. In 2011, China’s
highest court reinterpreted the country’s marriage law, deciding that
home ownership is determined by whose name is on the deed.
Thanks to prevailing social norms, in 70 percent of cases only the
man’s name is on the deed, even if the woman contributed money.
[24] Conveniently for a government that wants to see as many men

married as possible, this situation makes it much harder for a woman

to leave her husband or exert equal power in the relationship.[25]
An outside observer might conclude that home ownership in
China is more trouble than it is worth. But few within the country see
it that way. Men need a home in order to be attractive in the
marriage market. Status-hungry youth need to keep up with the
neighbors. And nearly everyone craves the stability and financial
security that a home supposedly offers. On top of these factors, real-
estate companies, dating websites, and government propaganda use
advertisements, op-eds, and misleading surveys to promote the idea
that young people should buy a home and scramble to find a spouse.
[26] Few with the means to join the exclusive club of Chinese

homeowners will forfeit the opportunity.

This harrowing housing situation has introduced some new terms
into the Chinese lexicon. One is kenlao (chewing on the old), which
describes young people who depend on their families to support
their lifestyle. With the importance of home ownership, parents are
usually more than willing to chip in (especially if their child is a man
at risk of becoming a bare branch). But with this support comes
extra pressure to earn more money and find a spouse.
Even more widely used is fangnu (house slave), used for people
who work tirelessly in order to stay ahead of their mortgage. On
average, Chinese families now have 66 percent of their assets tied
up in their homes, compared to 41 percent in the United States. In
Beijing, the figure is an astounding 84 percent.[27] The
accompanying mortgage obligation means constantly striving for
that promotion while scrimping and saving for the other two financial
“mountains” of healthcare and education, along with any other
necessary expenditures and status-building toys.
All this pressure may help to explain why struggling Chinese
youth are not more politically active. When they complete their
education they promptly embark on their next daunting challenge,

136
with the faint promise of a spouse and home beckoning them at the
other end of the tunnel. Moving up the pay scale and the social
ladder while finding that special someone command far more
attention than deeper political questions.[28]
Back on his farm in Shandong, Mr. Yang was preoccupied with
many things, but politics was not one of them. He was not even
aware that Xi Jinping was about to assume control of the Communist
Party and become China’s most powerful man. I asked Yang what he
planned to do in the future. “I’ll just go wherever the jobs are,” he
replied.
But it is always possible that China’s hopelessly single men will
present a more volatile wild card in the future. As the authors of Bare
Branches wrote, “The mere presence of dry, bare branches cannot
cause a fire, but when the sparks begin to fly, those branches can
act as kindling, turning sparks into flames.”
Back in Beijing, Kathy seemed content for the moment with
being single, but remained a bit apprehensive about the future. “I
think sooner or later I’ll get married,” she said. “I don’t buy what my
boyfriend told me about marriage, but I think he’s right that if you
get to a certain age, it’s hard to have a child. I think I’ll start to worry
when I’m thirty-two.”
Whether or not Kathy ever found a man was not of great
economic consequence. She was fortunate to have a comfortable
urban upbringing, a successful career, and a high degree of financial
independence. But for those young women brought up under poorer
conditions in rural areas, life can be quite bitter.
1. “Kathy.” Interview by author, Beijing, December 2013.
2. Qian, Yue. “Marriage Squeeze for Highly Educated Women?
Gender Differences in Assortative Marriage in Urban China.” Master’s
thesis, Ohio State University, 2012.
3. Hong Fincher, Leta. Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender
Inequality in China. London: Zed Books, 2014.
4. Hong Fincher, Leftover Women, 8.
5. National Bureau of Statistics. 2000 and 2010 National Census
data.
6. Shanghai Municipal Civil Affairs Bureau 2012 data.
7. Xinhua. “Official Vows China Will Correct Gender Imbalance.” May
24, 2012. Accessed May 15, 2014.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-
05/24/c_131608451.htm.
8. Chen, Youhua. [A Look at the Marriage Market in China and
Europe]. Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2004.
9. Yang. Interview by author, Huanghua, October 2012.
10. Jin, Xiaoyi, Lige Liu, Yan Li, Marcus Feldman, and Shuzhuo Li.

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“‘Bare Branches’ and the Marriage Market in Rural China: Preliminary
Evidence from a Village-Level Survey.” Chinese Sociological Review
46, no. 1 (2013): 83–104. doi:0.2753/CSA2162-0555460104.
11. “China Warned on Gender Imbalance.” BBC, August 24, 2007.
Accessed May 15, 2014. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-
pacific/6962650.stm.
12. Hvistendahl, Mara. Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over
Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. New York: Public
Affairs, 2011, 28.
13. Mazur, Allan, and Joel Michalek. “Marriage, Divorce, and Male
Testosterone.” Social Forces 77, no. 1 (September 1998): 327.
14. Wright, Robert. The Moral Animal. New York: Pantheon, 1994,
100.
15. Edlund, Lina, Hongbin Li, Junjian Yi, and Junsen Zhang. “Sex
Ratios and Crime: Evidence from China.” February 6, 2009. Accessed
May 15, 2014.
http://igov.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Sex%20ratios%20and%20crime.pdf
16. Hudson, Valerie M., and Andrea M. den Boer. Bare Branches: The
Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2004, 208.
17. Hudson, Valerie, and Andrea M. den Boer. “Surplus Males: The
Dangers of Asia’s Preference for Sons.” New York Times, May 13,
2004. Accessed May 15, 2014.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/opinion/13iht-
edhudson_ed3_.html.
18. Chin, Josh. “State TV Host Offers Advice on How to Throw Out
‘Foreign Trash.’” Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2012. Accessed October
19, 2014. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/05/18/state-tv-
host-offers-advice-on-how-to-throw-out-foreign-trash/?mod=WSJBlog.
19. Jin et al., “Bare Branches and the Marriage Market.”
20. Liu, Lige, Xiaoyi Jin, Melissa Brown, and Marcus Feldman. “Male
Marriage Squeeze and Inter-Provincial Marriage in Central China:
Evidence from Anhui.” Journal of Contemporary China 23, no. 86
(2014): 351–71. doi:10.1080/10670564.2013.832541.
21. Numbeo. “Property Prices Index for Country 2014.” Last modified
2014. http://www.numbeo.com/property-
investment/rankings_by_country.jsp.
22. Survey and Research Center for China Household Finance,
Southwestern University of Finance and Economics. 2012.
http://www.chfsdata.org/detail-19-26.html.
23. Wei, Shang-Jin, and Xiaobo Zhang. “The Competitive Saving
Motive: Evidence from Rising Sex Ratios and Savings Rates in
China.” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, June
2009.

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24. Hong Fincher, Leftover Women, 7.
25. Deere, Carmen, and Cheryl Doss. “The Gender Asset Gap: What
Do We Know and Why Does It Matter?” Feminist Economics 12, nos.
1–2 (2006): 39.
26. Hong Fincher, Leftover Women, 16.
27. Survey and Research Center for China Household Finance. China
Household Finance Survey. Southwestern University of Finance and
Economics, 2013.
28. Hong Fincher, Leftover Women, 102.

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 Chapter 10
Eating Bitterness
As Yang Sijia lay down in the coffin, her mind was fluttering with
the anger, guilt, and despair that had consumed her previous few
days and, in fact, most of her life. Between the twenty pounds she
had lost in the past two weeks, the abortion, and the suicide
attempts, everything had come together in an unholy storm. But
when the coffin’s lid slid shut, it left her in a dark isolation that put
everything in perspective. During those few minutes she vowed that
she would turn things around.
Sijia was born in 1990 in a rural Shaanxi province town near the
provincial capital of Xi’an. In 2011, while studying at a film college in
Xi’an, she was introduced to a director making an independent film
about a rural “ghost marriage” custom.
The region has a longstanding superstition that those who die
before marrying will spend eternity in loneliness unless they are
posthumously married and buried with a partner. The practice has
led to a thriving black market for corpses, with pretty young females
bringing in top dollar thanks to the prevalence of “bare branch” men.
One of the themes of the film, called The Cremator, was the
Chinese concept of “eating bitterness,” where one silently pushes
ahead in the face of extreme hardship. It is a concept with which
rural Chinese women are all too familiar.
Early in the film a young woman in a small Shaanxi town is
dredged from a river, presumably after committing suicide, and
taken to the local morgue. When presented with the unclaimed body,
the morticians start arranging to sell it for a ghost marriage.
However, Old Lao, the morgue’s terminally ill cremator, wanted the
girl to be his own eternal bride.
Sijia’s character, a young girl named Xiuqiao, shows up from a
poorer region looking for her missing sister, who had come to the
area to do migrant work. But Old Lao turns her away, saying that no
young women have turned up.
Lao later finds the girl prostituting herself to fund her ongoing
search. He tries persuading her to give up and go home but
eventually admits that a young woman was indeed brought in. He
leads her to the morgue, opens the cold chamber, and prods her to
have a look at the corpse’s face. She reluctantly obliges and then
slumps to the ground in despair, but she does not shed a single tear.
The film alludes to many issues that disproportionately plague
rural Chinese women: suicide, alienation during migrant work,
financial desperation leading to prostitution, and complications
stemming from the gender imbalance.

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 When I saw the film at a small screening with its director in
Beijing, I was intrigued by the character of Xiuqiao. In a country
where censorship has left most films sticking to tried-and-true
themes and trite overacting, Xiuqiao’s anguish seemed real. Though
the viewer can tell that she is shattered inside, she keeps stoically
biting her lip.
The director said that he used only nonprofessional local actors
in order to authentically depict rural Shaanxi life. If Yang Sijia’s quiet
agony was convincing, it was because her real life had entailed even
more bitterness than that of her character.
I met her at her small Beijing flat eighteen months after filming
was complete. Bundled in a sheepskin coat, her eyes would often
wander, and at times they began to swell as we spoke. But she
never lost her poise as she recounted how her personal story gave
authenticity to the character of Xiuqiao.

Sijia’s mud-brick childhood home sat in an agricultural Shaanxi
community of a few thousand people. During her first years, in the
early 1990s, sleepy villages like hers were just beginning to wake up
and send people off to the cities to make more money than they had
ever seen before. Soon after Sijia was born, her father went to
Guangdong to paint walls. When he returned after a few years with
the money he had saved, he was considered rich in the village. But it
would be short-lived.
Her father quickly got entwined with the wrong crowd and
became addicted to gambling. Before long, his riches turned into
debt and the family moved to urban Xi’an to do more migrant work.
The couple sold things on the street and later set up a stand selling
videos while Sijia attended a local primary school. Today, only an
hour’s drive on a new highway separates her hometown from Xi’an,
but in the late 1990s the two might as well have been in different
countries.
Sijia’s Xi’an classmates did not accept her. Her rural background
and strange-sounding dialect made her an outsider. Even the school
regarded her as second class. With her rural hukou she was
considered only a “temporary” student. As soon as she left class
each day, she immersed herself in movies at her parents’ video
stand. Her favorites were Jackie Chan Kung Fu flicks.
After five years she went back home to live with her
grandparents and attend middle school. By that point she had spent
the formative years of her life in Xi’an. Her accent and manner had
changed enough to alienate her from her new rural classmates. “I
felt like a foreigner in my own hometown,” she recalled.[1]
After less than a year at the new school, Sijia was diagnosed with

141
a serious heart condition. The family exhausted all the money they
had saved and began borrowing from friends and extended family
members to pay for her treatment. Then, as now, superstitions were
rampant in the countryside. Sijia’s grandparents hired a local “wise
man” to cure the affliction before it killed her. He told the family that
God must want Sijia to work for him, so they should find a girl of the
same age and height who had died recently to offer in her place.
Sijia’s grandparents asked around, scoured cemeteries, and
eventually found a candidate. Sijia and her family accompanied the
wise man to a famous Buddhist mountain, where they all said a
prayer together for God to take the other girl instead. Soon
afterward, Sijia recovered.
When she went back to school, rumors that she had been in the
hospital with an infectious disease kept her isolated. In retrospect,
she feels that being an outcast during this time was a blessing. She
buried herself in her studies and became a star student. For once,
she felt good. Perhaps she could be happy after all.
“But then, during the summer between middle school and high
school, something happened that wasn’t very happy,” she said,
lowering her head. “It changed my life.”
Her father had brought her to be a part-time cook for the
summer at a golf course where he was now working. The facility was
overwhelmingly used and staffed by men. One evening Sijia was
asked to keep an eye on a neighboring vendor’s shop and was told
that she could even use the shower. When she went to the back of
the shop and slipped out of her clothes, her father’s boss came in.
“There was only one wall between us and where my dad was,” she
said. “I was crying but it was my dad’s boss. I was scared, so I didn’t
scream.” She was sixteen years old.
Reliable statistics on sexual assaults in China do not exist, but
incidents like Sijia’s are not uncommon. Tsun-Yin Luo, a professor at
the Graduate Institute for Gender Studies at Shih-Hsin University in
Taipei, estimates that fewer than one out of ten sexual assaults are
ever reported in China.[2] “The patriarchal culture actually brings
sexual violence to female victims,” she told me. “Lots of victims of
sexual assault feel ashamed of their victimization, and even if they
don’t feel ashamed, their family ensures that they feel ashamed.”
Luo said that this culture disproportionally affects rural women,
who do not have the same access to information about their rights
as their urban counterparts. “Women in the countryside tend to be
left behind,” she said.
Over the following years, the man visited Sijia’s family often. She
became terrified whenever he walked in the door, but she never told
her family what had happened. Eventually the golf course went out

142
of business and she never saw him again. His mark would stay with
her though.
In high school her attitude changed radically. She began to bully
people and skip classes, but fortunately her studious habits had
stuck and she managed to pass the gaokao, getting into a Xi’an film
college where she could pursue her dream of becoming an actress.
While there she worked a gamut of part-time jobs to support
herself, from selling clothes on the street to washing dishes. One job
was at a high-end restaurant where she and another girl would stand
in skirts and high heels to greet customers at the door as they
entered. After a few months, her boss came to her and said he was
scaling back. Only one of the two girls would be retained. “If you’re
together with me, I’ll keep you,” he told Sijia. She decided to quit.
During high school and her early college years, Sijia was haunted
by what had happened at the golf course. She began painting her
walls with images that she still does not quite understand. One
depicted a clown crying next to an old man sitting on top of a jail.
During this period she would sometimes cut herself and even
attempted suicide four times by choking herself with a rope. But on
each occasion she lost her nerve.
Later she began visiting a Buddhist master whom she had met
during high school when her mother brought her to a temple to pray
before an exam. She says that this source of inspiration slowly
brought her out of her psychological torment. “Buddhism teaches
you to accept your destiny,” Sijia said. “In a former life, I owed
someone a debt, so I need to get rid of my sins. I used to want
revenge on that man, but now I’m at peace with it.”
Both Buddhism and Christianity, though influenced heavily by
local folk beliefs, have grown rapidly in rural China over the past two
decades. In addition to the easing restrictions on organized religion,
many attribute this trend to the shakeup of China’s social order and
the widespread need for spiritual coping mechanisms.[3] Sijia briefly
contemplated becoming a Buddhist nun but eventually dropped the
idea.
Later in college she began doing odd jobs on movie and TV sets.
Then, in summer 2011, she was introduced to Peng Tao, the director
preparing to make The Cremator. After reading the script, she
persuaded Peng that her life and Xiuqiao’s were virtually identical.
Peng said he would give her a shot, but she would have to lose
weight.
Over the next twelve days, Sijia managed to shed nearly twenty
pounds though constant exercise and eating only one meal per day.
At the time, she explained to me, she was motivated by money more
than anything else. For several months she had been dating a man

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who had just bought a house and was worried about finances. He
had often criticized Sijia for not having a steady income, so she
thought the 12,000 yuan ($1,920) that she would earn from the film
would prove her worth.
But the prospect of doing the film added further stress to a
relationship already on the rocks. The man wanted the money she
would receive but hated the fact that one scene would require
nudity. The two fought constantly. Then, as Sijia was in the midst of
her rapid weight loss, she found out that she was pregnant. “The guy
had a good background,” Sijia said. “Very different from mine. He
went to good schools and got a law degree from one of Xi’an’s best
colleges. In his whole life he never had any setbacks.”
Sijia reluctantly aborted the pregnancy. “I always thought that
even though I wasn’t a great person, at least I was a kind one,” she
said. “The abortion drove me completely mad. I wasn’t punished by
law, but deep in my heart I always consider myself a murderer.”
When production began, Sijia was thoroughly depressed and the
rapid weight loss only added to her stress. At one point in the film,
Xiuqiao faints; Sijia said that it happened spontaneously during
shooting because of her weak condition.
She also found herself almost completely surrounded by men. In
Shaanxi, the birth ratio was more than 130 males for every 100
females.[4] The imbalance even extended into the afterlife, creating
the black market for ghost brides depicted in the film.
Because no other young woman was available, Sijia
unexpectedly had to act as the corpse. This entailed being zipped
into a body bag, slid into a morgue’s cold chamber, and shut into a
coffin. She was furious about the assignment at first, but the
complete isolation and feeling of death gave her a new perspective.
“The moment I laid in the coffin, all outside sounds were gone,” she
said. “The only feeling I had was that I would live up to my life’s
potential.”

Sijia was actually better off, in some respects, than most rural
Chinese women. She was able to go to college and work in an
industry that she found rewarding. Both of these opportunities have
traditionally been unavailable to village women. Many rural residents
still subscribe to a traditional saying: “Men belong in public, women
belong at home” (nanzhuwai, nüzhunei).
An often-cited 2002 study found that, between 1995 and 1999,
Chinese women bucked world trends by committing suicide at a 25
percent higher rate than Chinese men. Furthermore, rural suicides
happened at three times the rate in urban areas, making rural

144
Chinese women an especially vulnerable group.[5]
The study shocked the nation and led to dozens of media reports
seeking to understand rural women’s plight. These reports tended to
portray a rigidly patriarchal countryside, where women were
considered worthless except for child rearing and housekeeping. Due
to this perceived uselessness, their families sold them off to abusive
husbands and repressive in-laws.
These assessments were not entirely unfair. Chinese tradition
dictates that when a couple marries, the woman joins the man’s
family. Because women were thought to have little economic
potential, raising them entailed a cost that could be repaid only by
their future husband. Thus, arranged marriages based on financial
pragmatism were (and largely remain) common, causing women to
be viewed as bought property and obligated to dutifully obey their
husbands’ family.
Researchers found that the main reasons for rural female
suicides were indeed abusive husbands and overbearing in-laws,
coupled with easy access to highly lethal pesticides. But a decade
after the infamous study, suicide rates among this demographic
group had plummeted. A newer study found that the annual suicide
rate among rural women aged fifteen to thirty-four was just 3 cases
per 100,000 people in 2011, down by over 90 percent from 37.8
cases per 100,000 in the late 1990s.[6] Research by Tsinghua
University sociologist Jing Jun similarly found that the overall suicide
rate among rural women in 2006 was about a quarter of what it had
been two decades earlier.[7]
In interviews, researchers Jing Jun and Michael Phillips (who
conducted the 2002 study) both cited urbanization as the primary
factor for the drop. The proportion of rural workers employed away
from home had reached 30 percent by 2011—more than quadruple
what it was in the late 1980s—leaving many women separated from
their husbands, in-laws, and pesticides for most of the year.[8]
Once kept powerless and financially dependent at home, China’s
migrant women were now in demand as maids, waitresses, and
factory workers in the nation’s booming cities. Through their migrant
work, they pulled their families from abject poverty and flipped the
family power dynamics, taking greater control of their lives.
According to survey data collected by Professor Jing Jun, in 1990, 37
percent of rural women had their marriage decided entirely by their
parents. By 2000, this figure had fallen to 16 percent.[9]
However, amid China’s economic boom, rural areas have not
kept up with cities and women still lag behind men. Disproportionate
education investments and gaokao quotas in the cities have caused

145
the proportion of rural students enrolled in college to drop. Only 5
percent of students from rural Shaanxi end up going to college,
compared to 70 percent of students in urban areas.[10] And among
rural families especially, resources tend to be directed toward boys,
while girls are often expected to drop out of school early to support
the family’s males.[11]
As a result, rural women remain at the very bottom of China’s
growing wealth and power gaps. While annual per-capita income
tripled for rural residents, from about 2,200 yuan ($352) in 2000 to
7,000 yuan ($1,120) in 2011, incomes in cities nearly quadrupled,
from 6,300 to 24,000 yuan ($1,010 to $3,842), during the same
period.[12] Again, rural women fared even worse. In 1990 they
earned 79 percent of what their male counterparts received; by
2010, they were earning only 56 percent of men’s compensation.[13]
As in other societies, the large gaps between rich urban men and
desperate rural women have left the latter group vulnerable to
exploitation by the former.

When Sijia’s restaurant boss held her job ransom for sexual
favors, her only choices were to consent or quit. Even if a rural
female worker wishes to fight back against sexual exploitation by an
urban boss, she seldom has the legal awareness or financial
resources to do so. Given this ever-present risk of sexual abuse, it is
not surprising that many migrant women skip traditional labor
altogether and go straight into sex work. With little education and
rampant discrimination, some have little to rely on but their bodies.
For her book Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist
China, Yale ethnographer Zheng Tiantian spent two years
documenting the lives of women who provide sexual services in the
country’s ubiquitous karaoke parlors. Zheng argued that the
androgynous socialist conformity instituted under Mao stripped
Chinese men of their masculinity, which they reclaimed by
subjugating women once they gained the economic means to do so.
“It seems that in the patriarchal state where resources are in the
hands of males, what is left for females is to find a sexual niche—
that is, to decorate an essentially male world,” Zheng wrote. “In this
patriarchal environment, it is not surprising that women have to use
their looks and sexuality—the only accepted talents of women—to
get ahead.”[14]
For those who tire of grueling factory work or get frustrated by
the glass ceiling at even the most menial jobs, sex work offers an
escape that migrants often find too tempting to pass up. One
estimate in 2000 put the number of prostitutes in China as high as

146
20 million (though other estimates have been far more
conservative), with major migrant destinations like Shenzhen and
Beijing hosting hundreds of thousands, overwhelmingly made up of
rural women.[15] According to the same estimate, prostitution and
related industries could represent anywhere from 6 to 12 percent of
China’s entire economy.
A young woman blessed with exceptionally good looks might
become the mistress of a wealthy businessman or government
official. Those unable to do so might end up as karaoke bar
“princesses” who entertain, get fondled by, and occasionally go
home with wealthy patrons. Or they might end up even further down
the sex industry ladder, toiling in the back of a seedy massage
parlor.
These thinly veiled brothels with pink lights and lingerie-clad
“masseuses” in their windows can be found in nearly any
neighborhood of every major Chinese city. In migrant meccas like the
cities of the Pearl River delta, entire districts are full of them.
I once interviewed a twenty-five-year-old woman who worked at
one of these establishments in Beijing. Her name was Yan, and she
had come to the capital from a small town in central Hubei province
after high school to make some money. She started out with a string
of waitress jobs, earning far better pay than she could get back
home, but the work was tiring, the hours long, and the customers
and managers demeaning. When she was twenty-three, a hometown
friend introduced her to a way that she could “make a lot of money
with work that’s not too tiring.”[16]
As far as her family and boyfriend back home knew, Yan was still
waitressing. But in reality, she was servicing three or four men per
day at the massage parlor. After the owner got her cut, Yan usually
took home around 10,000 yuan ($1,600) each month.
“It’s not much, is it?” she asked with a smile. In fact, it was more
than most educated urban Beijing women her age made. It was
three times what she could make in a factory and more than both
her parents and boyfriend earned combined.
“Of course I don’t like it,” she scoffed playfully when I asked how
she felt about her work. “But it’s alright.” After a few months on the
job, she said, she had gotten used to the sex, but was still struggling
to adjust to the boredom of sitting around all day and night waiting
for customers. In any case, though, she felt that this job beat
waitressing.

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Massage girls sit in a Shenzhen “barber shop” waiting for customers.
(Photo: Chris DCmaster, Flickr: Barber shop, Bao’an, Shenzhen,
China)
Up to that point she had been lucky. She had not experienced
any abuse from customers—most just did their business quickly and
went on their way—and there was always a man on security detail in
an adjacent room. Furthermore, the parlor had never been subject to
a police crackdown as far as Yan knew. Like most such brothels, it
was either under the protection of local authorities or deemed too
insignificant to disturb.
Yan’s experience is hardly indicative of all young migrants who
decide to market their bodies. As Zheng Tiantian and other scholars
have documented, abuse of prostitutes by both customers and
pimps is tragically common. Without the law or any nearby family
members to protect the sex workers, there is little recourse when
things turn violent. And the periodic vice crackdowns that arise out
of local power struggles or the need for a veneer of morality push
the sex trade further underground and put women more firmly under
the control of their handlers.[17]
Even rural women not involved in the sex trade are finding life a
bit scarier, especially in regions like Shaanxi with high male
surpluses. Numerous studies have linked China’s growing gender
imbalance to rises in abduction, trafficking, rape, forced prostitution,
forced marriage, and enslavement.[18] In 2012 near Yang Sijia’s
hometown, thirty-seven members of a gang were busted for raping
women and selling them into prostitution.[19]

Yan represents many young rural Chinese women of today—
afforded very few options, yet possessing just enough tools to break
free from the isolated existence into which they were born. Her
ultimate goal was to learn English, emigrate to Canada, and buy a
house—perhaps with her boyfriend if they got married, or perhaps
not. Her time in cosmopolitan Beijing had left her with little desire to
ever live in rural Hubei again. But at the same time, she was still a

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second-class citizen in the capital city, unable to reap the benefits of
an urban hukou and forever priced out of home ownership by the
astronomical housing prices.
Yan had romantic notions about Canada—that it was clean and
egalitarian, with a high quality of life. Best of all, she had heard that
even normal people like her could afford a nice house there. But the
few jumbled phrases that she attempted to speak in English
suggested that her plan was a long way from implementation.
Probably it would never happen. But if she played her cards right and
avoided serious trouble, maybe she would pull it off someday. The
mere chance to escape the destiny of her patriarchal birthplace is
something that generations of women before her lacked. Her work in
the city left her objectified in many ways but empowered in others.
Of the many contradictions in contemporary China, the position
of young rural women is among the greatest. By most measurable
indicators—suicide rates, marriage opportunities, education levels,
income—their situation has improved tremendously in recent years.
Many are breaking the shackles of their rural upbringings and
determining their own fates.
But by less measurable metrics—such as frequency of
exploitation, psychological status, or power relative to men—it is less
clear whether things are getting better or worse for them. The mass
migration to cities has brought new socioeconomic opportunities, but
it has also created its own unique hardships. Meanwhile, the growing
surplus of men in the countryside makes the situation ever more
precarious for the women left there. The exploitation of this precious
minority grows along with the gender imbalance. It is hard to say
whether the period of greatest bitterness for this group of women
lies in the past or the future.

By the time shooting on The Cremator ended, Yang Sijia had
broken up with her boyfriend and started spending time with one of
the film crew members, whom she described as “kind and honest.”
He would soon have to return home to Beijing, but Sijia promised
that when she finished school in December she would join him. “He
didn’t really believe me at first,” she said. “But after all the bad
things that had happened and the bad feelings while making the
movie, I just wanted to get out of the area.”
In true “eating bitterness” fashion, Sijia denied that her life is
indicative of any wider trends, saying that she has just been unlucky
and that her hardships are not an indictment of society. The last time
I spoke with her, she was in Beijing with her boyfriend, working on
film sets and occasionally acting. She said her favorite movie was
Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness and that she hoped to

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eventually make her own films, which would portray people caring
for one another. Overall, she was optimistic about her chances of
being happy and that China would become a better place for people
like her.
“I think you always have to have hope,” she said. “My Buddhist
mentor told me it’s the heart that determines your environment.
Good people will live in good places, and good places always have
good people.”
1. Yang, Sijia. Interview by author, Beijing, January 2013. Some
quotations first appeared in Fish, Eric. “‘Eating Bitterness’: Hardship
and Opportunity for Rural Women in China.” The Atlantic, May 17,
2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/05/eating-
bitterness-hardship-and-opportunity-for-rural-women-in-
china/275978/.
2. Luo, Tsun-Yin. Telephone interview by author, April 2013. For
further reading see Luo, Tsun-Yin. “Marrying My Rapist?! The Cultural
Trauma among Chinese Rape Survivors.” Gender and Society 14, no.
4 (2000).
3. He, Guanghu. “Religion and Hope: A Perspective from Today’s
China.” The Humanities Study. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,
2003. Accessed October 20, 2014.
http://bic.cass.cn/English/InfoShow/Article_Show_Forum2_Show.asp?
ID=273&Title=The+Humanities+Study&strNavigation=Home-
%3EForum&BigClassID=4&SmallClassID=8.
4. Wei, Xingzhu, Lu Li, and Therese Hesketh. “China’s Excess Males,
Sex Selective Abortion, and One Child Policy: Analysis of Data from
2005 National Intercensus Survey.” British Medical Journal, 2009.
Accessed December 16, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.b1211.
5. Phillips, Michael, Xianyun Li, and Yanping Zhang. “Suicide Rates in
China, 1995–99.” The Lancet, no. 9309 (2002): 835–40.
6. Wang, Chong-Wen, Cecilia Chan, and Paul Yip. “Suicide Rates in
China from 2002 to 2011: An Update.” Social Psychiatry and
Psychiatric Epidemiology 49, no. 6 (2014): 929–41.
7. Jing, Jun. Interview by author, Beijing, April 2013. For further
reading see Jing, Jun, Xueya Wu, and Jie Zhang. “” [Rural Female
Migration and a Decrease in China’s Suicide Rate]. China Agricultural
University Journal of Social Sciences Edition 27, no. 4 (2010).
8. Jing, Jun. Interview by author; Phillips, Michael. Telephone
interview by author, April 2013.
9. Jing, Jun. Interview by author.
10. Stanford University and Chinese Academy of Science.
“Understanding the Education Gap in Rural China.” Stanford
University Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Accessed October 20, 2014.

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http://fsi.stanford.edu/research/understanding_the_education_gap_in_rural_china
11. Brown, Philip, and Albert Park. “Education and Poverty in Rural
China.” Economics of Education Review 21 (2002): 523–41.
12. China National Bureau of Statistics, 2013.
13. “Gender Income Gap Continues to Widen.” China Daily, May 16,
2013. Accessed May 18, 2014.
http://english.people.com.cn/90882/8245636.html.
14. Zheng, Tiantian. Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in
Postsocialist China. Minneapolis: Regents of the University of
Minnesota, 2009, 29.
15. Zhong, Wei. “‘’” [A Close Look at China’s ‘Sex Industry’].
Lianhe Zaobao (Beijing), October 2, 2000.
16. Yan. Interview by author, Beijing, April 2013.
17. Zheng, Red Lights, 74–84.
18. Jin, Xiaoyi, Lige Liu, Yan Li, Marcus Feldman, and Shuzhuo Li.
“‘Bare Branches’ and the Marriage Market in Rural China: Preliminary
Evidence from a Village-Level Survey.” Chinese Sociological Review
46, no. 1 (2013): 83–104. doi:0.2753/CSA2162-0555460104.
19. “Shaanxi Police Arrest 37 for Rapes, Abductions.” Shanghai Daily,
August 22, 2012. Accessed December 16, 2013.
http://www.china.org.cn/china/2012-08/22/content_26308198.htm.

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 Chapter 11
Finding Faith
On an autumn afternoon in 2011, a young mother in the
southern Guangdong city of Foshan scampered to pull laundry inside
as a storm brewed. In her haste, she lost track of her two-year-old
daughter, Wang Yue. Only days later would surveillance camera
footage reveal to her, and to the world, the sickening sequence of
events that transpired next.
The little girl had wandered into a nearby alley as a large white
van lurched forward, its driver chatting on his cell phone. Her head
turned just in time to meet the oncoming headlight as it ran her
over. The driver paused, then slowly ran over the girl again with the
back tire before driving away.
Over the next few minutes, several people passed through the
narrow road. One by one, they each skirted around little Yue,
ignoring her as she lay battered and bleeding. A young woman and
her own young daughter glanced down, but kept their brisk pace
forward. Finally, a fifty-eight-year-old scrap peddler came upon Yue
and shouted to alert her mother. In the seven minutes since she had
been hit, little Wang Yue had been neglected by eighteen passersby.
The van driver allegedly (although this account has been
disputed) explained his actions to a reporter before turning himself
in, saying, “If she’s dead, I may pay only about 20,000 yuan
($3,200). But if she’s injured, it may cost me hundreds of thousands
of yuan.”[1] Little Yue succumbed to her injuries eight days later.
Similar incidents of voluntary manslaughter and heartless
bystanders had grabbed attention in China for years, but the Foshan
video’s graphic nature shocked the nation into weeks of
introspection. Academics, sociologists, and journalists from around
the country pondered how China had so badly lost its way.
A few weeks later I met a twenty-one-year-old college student
from Hefei named Chu Zhen who, like many young people at the
time, had been keeping a close eye on the Wang Yue story. “I think
Chinese almost don’t have morals,” he said. “In ancient China
people had merits, but now more and more Chinese just care about
money. Reform and Opening Up changed us. We don’t know what’s
right.”[2]
Legions of Chinese youth were feeling the same as Chu Zhen.
For three decades after the foundation of the People’s Republic,
Chinese were taught to worship Mao, strive for Communism, and put
the needs of the masses before personal interests. Sacrifice and
humble living, they were told, were the marks of a model citizen. But

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when China’s markets were opened, the socialist moral framework
began to crumble along with the socialist economy.
Getting rich, which was previously a crime, suddenly became
glorious. Those who continued to labor altruistically for the masses
lost their revered status in the new society, while those who clawed
and swindled their way to material fortunes were admired. Concepts
of right and wrong were flipped on their heads.
In 2002, Hong Kong University professor Wang Xiaoying
described this as China’s “post-Communist personality,” warning
that free markets had taken hold without the emergence of a
sustaining moral order. “Whatever the intrinsic flaws of capitalism as
a social system, China’s social problems seem to come as much from
the failure to establish a viable capitalist social order,” Wang wrote.
[3]
Chu Zhen said that he used to feel lost in society. He was the
only child in his family, and the tectonic societal shifts that had
occurred between his parents’ era and his own left a severe
generation gap. “I grew up almost by myself; my parents were very
busy and didn’t have time to care about me,” Chu said. “I used to be
aggressive. I did a lot of bad things to my friends, parents, and
people who cared about me. At that time I just wanted to find a
belief.”
In retrospect, gravitating to religion seemed inevitable for Chu. It
was just a matter of something knocking over that first domino. For
him it was the movie Forrest Gump. When one of his teachers
screened the film, he was struck by a scene where Gump went on
the Dick Cavett Show to recount his trip to China. The host and
fellow guest John Lennon found it hard to “imagine” that the Chinese
do not practice religion. “We don’t understand why Americans are
surprised that Chinese don’t have faith,” Chu said. “We think that’s
very normal.”
Wanting to experience what Americans apparently took for
granted, Chu started going to church and Bible studies around
campus. Within a few weeks, he was sold. “We sang songs, told
stories. I found peace in my mind. I went again and again, and
became a Christian.”
Yang Fenggang, a Purdue sociologist and author of Religion in
China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule, told me that it is
common for youth like Chu Zhen in today’s China to feel this anomie.
“Many people felt lost in this market transition,” Yang said. “But then
they somehow ended up at a church and realized Christianity
provides a clear set of values and moral standards, and that it’s
good living a life where you know what you should and shouldn’t
do.”[4]

153

China had fewer than a million Christians in 1949 before the
Communist Party all but stamped out religion for the next three
decades. A few years after it launched Reform and Opening Up, the
Party reluctantly reopened the gates to faith, expecting that only
elders clinging to “feudal superstitions” would trickle in to seize the
newfound freedom. Instead, a flood poured through. According to
government figures, which count only worshippers in state-
sanctioned churches, there were roughly 24 to 40 million Christians
in China by 2014.[5] But independent estimates accounting for
unofficial worshippers put that number at anywhere from 70 million
to over 130 million.[6]
According to Yang Fenggang, nearly every Chinese university
now has a thriving Christian community. “When I talk with [Christian
students] I find the atheist education is weak and they’re more open-
minded with nothing really holding them back from converting to a
religion,” he said. “Especially one that’s perceived as modern and
Western.”
Though religion was tolerated after the economic reform of the
1980s, the Communist Party continued to actively discourage and
often suppress it. In 2001, then-President Jiang Zemin called on
cadres at all levels to cautiously accommodate believers, but also to
guide religion toward adapting to socialist society and to promote
atheism among the younger generation.[7] Official role models were
to remain godless and inspired exclusively by socialism. But for
young Chinese, that message rang hollower by the day.
In the months following little Wang Yue’s death in Foshan, the
country continued its bout of soul-searching. Numerous factors
contributing to the attitudes displayed in this incident were cited.
Many of these factors were by no means unique to China, but the
hypothesis offered again and again was that a spiritual vacuum had
emerged amid the excesses of capitalism. So the Communist Party
responded by dusting off an old socialist icon.
Lei Feng had long been a symbol of altruism in China. The
People’s Liberation Army soldier, killed in an accident in 1962 at age
twenty-one, had allegedly lived his life doing good deeds like
cleaning his comrades’ socks, shoveling manure for people’s
communes, and giving up his train tickets to those in greater need.
Lei detailed his deeds in a diary that also conveniently documented
his source of inspiration. “I have only one desire in my heart,” read
one entry. “I want to be wholeheartedly dedicated to the Party,
socialism, and Communism.”[8]
Today, most historians agree that Lei Feng’s life story was at

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least partially (if not completely) fabricated by propagandists. But
the legend lives on in Chinese education, to the extent that Lei Feng
is a universally recognized symbol among Chinese youth.
Little Wang Yue’s death occurred a few months before the annual
“Learn from Lei Feng Day” on March 5. As China’s moral decay and
loss of empathy remained fervently discussed topics, the Communist
Party went on a propaganda blitz promoting Lei Feng spirit. For
weeks leading up to the holiday, billboards were erected, speakers
delivered speeches at schools, and media ran Lei Feng–themed
programs around the clock. One Chinese Central Television (CCTV)
segment struck an almost religious tone, proclaiming, “The Lei Feng
spirit has been a source of strength for the Chinese nation. The Lei
Feng spirit is eternal.”
In the end, the campaign fell flat. Weibo overflowed with cynical
remarks lampooning Lei Feng and his irrelevance in modern China.
At a time when socialism existed in name only and materialism
prevailed, “Lei Feng spirit” was a hard sell. A few days after the
holiday, even the Party mouthpiece People’s Daily asked, “Is learning
from Lei Feng now outdated?”[9]
During the campaign, one CCTV segment depicting “modern Lei
Fengs” caught my eye. The subject was a lanky, bearded, forty-
something American named David Deems. For the better part of two
decades, Deems had taught in some of the very poorest parts of
China. He always insisted that his schools cut his salary to the same
dismal level as his Chinese colleagues and house him in the same
rundown dorms. He wore old shoes with holes in them, kept only a
backpack’s worth of worldly possessions, and listed “serving the
people” on the interests portion of his résumé.
It turned out that Deems had been the focus of numerous
Chinese television segments over the years. But when I dug deeper
still, I discovered something that all these programs had neglected
to mention: his motivation came from his devout Christian faith. One
young man from the northwestern province of Gansu blogged that
Deems had inspired several of his college classmates to become
Christians themselves.[10]
For a generation that increasingly sees its Communist leaders as
hypocritical and corrupt, Marx offers very little in terms of inspiration
for altruism. With the cult of Mao killed off before they were even
born, young people looking for a moral code and something to
believe in are turning their backs on socialist icons.

Shortly after “Learn from Lei Feng Day,” I started attending a
popular “English Corner” at a public square in Renmin University,

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where young Chinese practice speaking with foreigners. Every time I
went, the biggest group by far congregated around a forty-one-year-
old American missionary going by his Chinese name, a
transliteration of “Hallelujah.” Wearing a suit and tie adorned with a
crucifix pin, he shouted into a belt-mounted megaphone and used an
iPad to illustrate biblical lessons. “Marxism is a terrible system,” he
once told the group, contradicting everything they had ever been
taught in school. “Marxism is the exact opposite of the Bible.”
The crowd was receptive to the message, laughing in agreement
the moment he chastised Marx. Other messages Hallelujah delivered
—that abortion, belief in evolution, and Buddhist idol worship were
evil—received a chillier reception. When he began to discuss the gift
of speaking in tongues, he earned a more derisive round of laughter.
“I think he’s insane,” one young man in the crowd said to me. “But I
think he’s a good person. Some people are insane but don’t know it
—like being drunk.”

A sign at the Renmin University public square where English Corner takes
place.
(Photo: Eric Fish)
Most of the young people there seemed interested in Hallelujah
chiefly for entertainment, but a few did appear moved. One girl
came to the front and whispered into his ear, concerned that she had
not yet been able to hear the Holy Spirit or speak in tongues herself.
Another girl said she was becoming more interested in Christianity
and coming to hear more every week.
When I spoke with Hallelujah a few weeks later, he claimed that
about one-tenth of the people to whom he preaches actually become
interested in Christianity—a number that would make any Western
missionary envious.[11]
At the university where I taught in Nanjing, several of the other
foreign teachers were Christian missionaries like Hallelujah, though

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they were subtler in their methods. Some would bring up Christian
themes in class discussions or talk about their faith at English
Corners. One year at Easter, a teacher invited students to her home
to watch a movie about the holiday, which turned out to be The
Passion of the Christ. According to students, a few girls began crying
during the bloody crucifixion scenes, and some later converted after
the teacher told them that “Jesus did this for you.”
By day these students would sit through tedious lectures in
Marxism and socialist morality, playing along with lessons of a
bygone era that even the instructors would acknowledge were
hopelessly discredited. But by night, many would go to Bible studies
with foreign teachers or study-abroad students. There they were
treated to lessons about a supernatural deity who was always
listening to their prayers and—perhaps more importantly—
monitoring their sins.
The message and the messengers were appealing. The
Christians offered biblical answers to the problems and moral
quandaries that the students brought to them. Whereas they would
often be brushed off when seeking guidance from their fudaoyuan or
other school staff, the Christians became intimately involved in their
lives. They would give dating advice, listen to the students’
problems, and sometimes just provide a shoulder to cry on.
Such scenes were occurring in universities across the country,
and by 2011 the central government had taken notice. That year the
General Office of the powerful Central Committee circulated a secret
document nationwide relaying concerns that foreign missionaries
were “infiltrating” colleges and becoming too influential. The
document was reportedly given only to municipal-level cadres with
instructions to communicate the contents orally to lower officials.[12]
The document, which was later leaked, reflected an old
Communist Party mentality that was still kicking strong. “Foreign
hostile forces have put even greater emphasis on using religion to
infiltrate China to carry out their political plot to westernize and
divide China,” it read. “The goal of foreign use of religion to infiltrate
institutes of higher education is not just to expand religious influence
but more to vie with us for our young people; our next
generation.”[13]
In a carrot-and-stick approach, the document offered guidance
on how to forcibly stop “illegal religious activities” but also offered
ways to counter the attractiveness of foreign missionaries, such as
providing psychological counseling for troubled students and holding
heart-to-heart talks in order to understand their problems.
But then the document zeroed in on what the Communist Party

157
thought could best prevent students from exploring Christianity in
the first place. “Launch thorough and meticulous political ideological
education,” it said. “Extensively launch activities for the study,
teaching, publicizing, and popularization of core socialist values.
Strengthen propaganda for and education in Marxist views on
religion.”
It is impossible to assess the document’s effectiveness, as
central government directives routinely go ignored by lower officials.
But harassment of underground religious activities backed by
foreigners had never been discontinued. Three months after the
document was issued, a foreign missionary in northeastern China
posted a blog entry stating that an illegal house church with which
he worked had been raided by police. They detained several
congregants and pressed four lines of questioning: what kind of
religious group they were, where their money came from, what they
were preaching, and what role the foreigners played.[14]
Incidents like this one were not unusual. Western Christians are
often viewed as agents of imperialism like those who accompanied
the violent foreign incursions of the nineteenth century.
Usually though, if illegal house churches do not have contact
with foreigners and limit their gatherings to a few dozen people, they
are left alone. One of my students, Sue (a pseudonym), told me
about a house church near campus that she and many of her
classmates attended on weekends. It had about 150 members, who
came at different times to ensure that the number at any given
service was not large enough to attract unwanted attention. It had
been operating for six years without incident, although Sue felt that
the police almost certainly knew about it. “If our church has too
much communication with churches abroad or Western preachers,
then maybe people who go there will be monitored by the
government,” she told me. “But there are too many churches like
this; they can’t ban them all.”[15]
The students did not really need this clandestine gathering if all
they wanted was Christian worship. There were state-sanctioned
churches all over the city, including China’s largest at the time, with
room for five thousand people. I asked Sue why she and her
classmates did not just go to one of these churches. “Their words
and hymns will all be checked by the government,” she answered.
“There’s a lot they won’t approve of, so if we just listen to that we’ll
never grow.”
I had walked into services at several official churches around
China and could see why they might not be appealing to young
people. Though large and beautiful, they tended to be crammed with

158
retirees singing gentle songs and listening to restrained sermons.
When I moved to Beijing, I discovered the appeal of the
alternative. As I rode the elevator in my apartment building one day,
a girl in her twenties handed me a card for the house church on the
floor just below mine. I asked if I was still welcome, given that I was
an atheist and, even worse, a journalist. “Then you should definitely
come,” she laughed.
The “church” was a small studio apartment identical to my own.
Situated in Beijing’s Zhongguancun district, it was strategically
situated between Peking, Tsing​hua, and Renmin Universities. Twenty-
five congregants showed up on the Sunday I attended, making it a
very full house. Other than an American student, a middle-aged
woman, and her young child, all were in their twenties, either
professionals or students from nearby colleges. They stood chatting
and eating snacks before the service started, enthusiastically
welcoming each newcomer. A young woman from a nearby medical
college told me that she had come to the church for several months
before ultimately converting. “Finally, I felt Jesus as clearly as I see
you right now,” she said.
The forty-something preacher, named Brother Xin, took the
pulpit before rows of tightly packed chairs. “Thank you for
overcoming the obstacles to be here,” he said. He leafed through the
Bible, reading verses from the gospel of Mark on the faithless. His
delivery gradually became more passionate and he occasionally
pounded on the podium. “Many who go to church on Sunday are
Christians; they have Christmas and Bibles,” he exclaimed. “But they
don’t represent religion. They think they represent Christianity, but
they don’t know the heart of God. They still have Satan in them!”
After he spoke, a girl took out a guitar and everyone stood. The
congregation belted out upbeat hymns in both Chinese and English
as they swayed back and forth with their hands in the air. One young
woman started crying as she sang.
Toward the end of the service, congregants were invited to the
front to give personal testimonies. A few described hardships in their
family or school and how faith was helping them through their
challenges. One girl wept as she spoke of her sister, who she hoped
would soon join her in converting. Several in the audience grasped
each other’s hands.
The outpouring of emotion was something I had never seen
before in China, where people tend to hide their true feelings and
weaknesses from strangers. Even family members commonly refrain
from open displays of affection toward one another, but there was no
such hesitancy in this church. Everyone referred to each other as
brother and sister.

159
 Sue related having had a nearly identical experience at her
church in Nanjing. “When I began to have some contact with
brothers and sisters in the church, they treated me just like family,”
she said. “Maybe my parents have the closest relationship with me,
but they can’t understand me or love me like this.”
It was obvious what the state-sanctioned religious experience
was missing. A firebrand like Brother Xin would never be approved to
preach at an official church. Spontaneous testimony from
congregants would also be out of the question. After a lifetime of
struggling to communicate with parents of a very different
generation and being educated in rigid Marxist dogma, these young
people were finding in their underground church something that they
could not find anywhere else: a community of unconditional love and
acceptance.
Chu Zhen recalled that a similar experience in his house church
was the biggest influence in his decision to convert. “Brothers and
sisters were very kind to me,” he said. “They cared about me and
taught me how to love people. That was the biggest change.”
Gerda Wielander, a researcher of Chinese religion at
Westminster University and author of Christian Values in Communist
China, argues that this concept of loving your neighbor is largely
absent from traditional Chinese beliefs. “In Confucianism it’s not
universal,” she told me. “It’s hierarchical. The degree of compassion
you have for somebody relates to how close you are on the
hierarchy.”[16]
Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong has described these hierarchical
relationships as like the surface of a lake after a rock has been
thrown in. The distance of each circle from the center represents
social and emotional distance, with blood connections the closest,
followed loosely by hometown people and then those with a similar
social identity (rich, poor, urban, rural, white collar, blue collar). The
further someone is outside the center circle, the more that person is
either seen as a tool to benefit those closer to the center, or simply
disregarded.[17]
This mentality has been frequently cited as an aggravating
factor in the social ills plaguing China, from environmental
degradation and endemic food safety problems to corruption and
cases like little Wang Yue’s.[18]
Wielander said that, to some extent, attitudes within the
Communist Party have begun to shift from seeing Christianity
primarily as a threat toward viewing it as a tool. “There’s a fair
amount of overlap between the government agenda and the
Christian agenda,” she said. “When you speak to [Chinese

160
Christians] or look at the data, they all emphasize what good citizens
they are and what good citizens they want to be, so there’s a lot for
the government to tap into there.”[19]

In spite of ongoing crackdowns on house churches, some
quarters of the government have paradoxically given signals of a
warming to Christianity due to its moral, economic, and even
political potential. “Christianity is seen as useful from the official
point of view because it’s not just about acting morally as an
individual and being a good citizen. It’s about the work ethic,”
Wielander said. She pointed out that the government seemed to be
attracted to sociologist Max Weber’s idea of the “Protestant work
ethic” and to the argument that religion had curbed excesses of
greed and corruption in Western market economies during the early
stages of capitalist development.
A number of Chinese universities now have religious studies
departments, and academics at all levels, including the government-
backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, have published
research on the positive contributions of Christianity in China. A
foreign missionary who helped to build state-sanctioned churches
told me that he was finding himself increasingly welcomed with open
arms by local officials and even, on occasion, quietly encouraged to
try converting locals.
In spite of this warming attitude, though, many quarters of the
Communist Party remain deeply suspicious of Christianity and its
potential for stirring up social upheaval.
In Beijing’s Zhongguancun district, a literal stone’s throw away
from the small house church that I visited, the Protestant Shouwang
church has regularly been shut down and its leaders arrested,
forcing it to change locations more than twenty times. Started by a
charismatic Tsing​hua graduate in 1993, the church had grown to
over one thousand members by 2011.[20] Then there is the Almighty
God cult, which came to prominence in 2014 when five of its
members bludgeoned a woman to death in a McDonald’s for being
an “evil spirit.” The group, which is thought to have perhaps
hundreds of thousands of members, believes that a forty-something
Chinese woman is the reincarnate of Jesus Christ. Its ultimate stated
goal is “to kill the Communist Party.”[21] What worries the Chinese
government most about such religious groups is their organizational
power and the potential for wayward figureheads to lead their flocks
in subversive directions.
Historical precedents give reason for such concern. The Catholic
Church’s role in the 1989 fall of Communist rule in Poland provides a

161
cautionary tale for China’s Communist leaders. Closer to home, the
Falun Gong spiritual movement blindsided the Communist Party in
1999 when more than ten thousand of its members surrounded the
Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing, demanding an end to
their repression (the government subsequently deemed Falun Gong
an illegal cult and launched an aggressive crackdown that remains
ongoing). Then there was Hong Xiuquan, the disillusioned
nineteenth-
century intellectual who decided he was Jesus Christ’s younger
brother. His small Taiping religious movement grew into a fourteen-
year rebellion that left 20 million dead.
However, few scholars see much political threat from any
modern Christian movement in China. “As long as they can worship
freely, they tend not to criticize the government or policy,” Yang
Fenggang said. “Theologically they’re evangelical but politically
they’re apolitical.”
Some within the Communist Party even appear to be viewing
religion more as a means to maintain control than as a way of losing
it, as if Marx’s idea of religion as “the opiate of the masses” may not
necessarily be a bad thing. Peng Guoxiang, a Peking University
professor of Chinese philosophy and religions, told me that this is
nothing new in China. “Almost every emperor knew the power of
religion,” he said. “It is very possible that the authorities have
started to rethink the function of religion and how to manipulate it
skillfully, instead of simply trying to curb or even uproot its
development.”[22]
In 2014, President Xi Jinping said that “religion has much wisdom
in encouraging human goodness,” and an earlier report cited sources
with ties to China’s leadership as saying Xi was “troubled by what he
sees as the country’s moral decline and obsession with money.”[23]
But contrary to signals from some other high officials, he expressed
hope that China’s traditional beliefs of Confucianism, Buddhism, and
Taoism, rather than Christianity, would help to “fill a void that has
allowed corruption to flourish.”[24]
In spring 2014, several prominent churches and Christian crosses
were torn down across Zhejiang province in the east, ostensibly in a
campaign to demolish structures that violated zoning restrictions.
But documents leaked to the New York Times revealed that only
“overly popular” Christian locations were targeted.[25] Later that
year, the government seemed to take another step back from the
warming that had unfolded in previous years when it announced it
would be establishing a unique Chinese Christian theology that
“adapts to China’s national condition” and is compatible with “the

162
country’s path of socialism.”[26]
Conversely, other accounts have suggested that local officials in
restive areas with large Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist populations
have welcomed Christianity as a preferable alternative to the more
politically volatile local religions.[27] Gerda Wielander commented
that the Chinese government is no longer a unified monolith and that
it comprises a wide range of opinions on what the roles of different
religions should be. “Both Buddhism and Daoism are fairly
otherworldly,” she said. “They’re more about how to escape from all
this chaos and hide from this terrible world, whereas Christianity is
very proactive. That can be a good thing for the government,
provided it manages to channel this energy into projects on the
government’s agenda.”

A few weeks after the Wang Yue incident, I sat down with my
Christian acquaintance Sue, a few of her friends, and Chu Zhen to
talk about faith in their lives. It appeared that through studying with
foreign Christian missionaries, they had picked up some of the more
controversial tenets of evangelical Christianity. Sue recommended a
book to me “debunking” evolution and casually mentioned that
homosexuality is a sin. However, most of their comments seemed
inoffensive to, and sometimes even supportive of, the Communist
Party line.
They all related how Christianity had given them a greater desire
to help others. One young man discussed the aid work that he had
done in rural Gansu province (where he also took the opportunity to
proselytize whenever he could).
Unlike the rest of the young Christians in the group, one girl said
she did not have any significant life problems before converting. She
had gotten along well with her family and done well in school, so I
asked why someone like her would be drawn to religion. “When
people pursue materialism, maybe they’ll have success,” she
replied. “But after they finish and they’re alone, they’ll find their
earnings and material goods can’t satisfy their empty heart.”
She summarized an attitude that many successful young
Chinese appeared to be displaying. Having found material comfort,
they craved spiritual satisfaction. Some found it in endeavors outside
religion, such as nature, sports, or secular volunteer work. But unlike
these other outlets, religion is inescapably political. Regardless of the
signs that the government was warming up to Christianity, there
were still constraints. Government leaders had to be atheists,
proselytism was illegal, and those who did not acknowledge that
their church was subject to the authority of the Communist Party

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were in violation of the law.
I put these issues before the young Christians, but they
appeared unconcerned so long as they could go on worshipping
without harassment. “The Bible says we have to follow the rules of
the government,” Sue said. “We have to follow the rules but we
should also have faith. It’s not contradictory.”
Chu Zhen dissented. “Socialism contradicts Christianity,” he
snapped. “The Party thinks God doesn’t exist.”
Sue shot back, “Their socialism isn’t real socialism. It’s Chinese
socialism.”
1. “Toddler’s Survival Unlikely.” China Daily, October 17, 2011.
Accessed May 19, 2014. http://china.org.cn/china/2011-
10/17/content_23641415.htm.
2. Chu, Zhen. Interview by author, Nanjing, November 2011. Some
quotations first appeared in Fish, Eric. “China’s ‘Come to Jesus’
Moment.” Foreign Policy, February 15, 2012. Accessed November 1,
2014.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/15/china_christian_awakening
3. Wang, Xiaoying. “The Post-Communist Personality: The Spectre of
China’s Capitalist Market Reforms.” China Journal, no. 47 (2002): 1.
4. Yang, Fenggang. Telephone interview by author, August 2011. For
further reading see Yang, Fenggang. “Lost in the Market, Saved at
McDonald’s: Conversion to Christianity in Urban China.” Journal for
the Scientific Study of Religion 44, no. 4 (2005): 423–41.
5. Chen, Boyuan. “China Has 23–40 Million Christians.” China.org.cn,
August 6, 2014. Accessed October 20, 2014.
http://china.org.cn/china/2014-08/06/content_33161694.htm.
6. “Christianity in China: Sons of Heaven.” The Economist, October 2,
2008. Accessed October 20, 2014.
http://www.economist.com/node/12342509.
7. Overmyer, Daniel. “Religion in China Today.” China Quarterly 174
(2003): 307–16.
8. Schell, Orville. Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen
Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders. New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1995, 246.
9. “Is Learning from Lei Feng Now Outdated?” People’s Daily Online,
March 8, 2010. Accessed May 19, 2014.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/indepth/2010-
03/08/c_13201861.htm.
10. “” [Joseph’s Technicolor Dreamcoat Blog] (blog). “”
Know David Deems: An American Christian with Love for the Lord
Teaching in Dongxiang]. February 2, 2010. Accessed May 19, 2014.
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4d87d8e20100hvqh.html.
11. “Hallelujah.” Interview by author, Beijing, May 2012. Some

164
quotations first appeared in Fish, Eric. “Missionaries in the Middle
Kingdom.” Economic Observer, October 12, 2012. Accessed
November 1, 2014.
http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/2012/1012/234521.shtml.
12. Wan, William. “Chinese Leaders Still Suspicious of Religion, Party
Document Shows.” Washington Post (Beijing), December 19, 2012.
Accessed May 23, 2014.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-leaders-
still-suspicious-of-religion-party-document-
shows/2012/12/18/706637f6-4856-11e2-ad54-
580638ede391_story.html.
13. Wan, “Chinese Leaders Still Suspicious.”
14. The Gospel in China (blog). “Police Situation Update—Released.”
August 9, 2011. Accessed May 23, 2014.
http://gospelinchina.com/2011/08/08/571/.
15. “Sue.” Interview by author, Nanjing, November 2011.
16. Wielander, Gerda. Interview by author, Beijing, August 2011 and
April 2014. For further reading see Wielander, Gerda. “Beyond
Repression and Resistance: Christian Love and China’s Harmonious
Society.” China Journal 65, no. 1 (2011): 119–39.
17. Fei, Xiaotong, Gary G. Hamilton, and Zheng Wang. From the Soil,
the Foundations of Chinese Society: A Translation of Fei Xiaotong’s
Xiangtu Zhongguo, with an Introduction and Epilogue. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992.
18. Zhang, Lijia. “How Can I Be Proud of My China If We Are a Nation
of 1.4bn Cold Hearts?” The Guardian, October 22, 2011. Accessed
October 21, 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/22/china-
nation-cold-hearts.
19. Wielander. Interview by author. Some quotations first appeared
in Fish, “China’s ‘Come to Jesus’ Moment.”
20. Aikman, David. “Beijing’s Theology of Repression.” Wall Street
Journal, July 11, 2011. Accessed October 21, 2014.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230476060457642826021
21. Moore, Malcolm. “Inside China’s Most Radical Cult.” The
Telegraph, August 21, 2014. Accessed September 3, 2014.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/11046155/Inside-
Chinas-most-radical-cult.html.
22. Peng, Guoxiang. E-mail interview by author, January 2012.
23. “” [Xinjiang Construction of the Motherland Getting Better and
Better]. People’s Daily, May 4, 2014. Accessed May 30, 2014.
http://politics.people.com.cn/n/2014/0504/c1024-24968469.html.
24. Lim, Benjamin K., and Ben Blanchard. “Xi Jinping Hopes
Traditional Faiths Can Fill Moral Void in China: Sources.” Reuters,

165
September 29, 2013. Accessed May 23, 2014.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/29/us-china-politics-vacuum-
idUSBRE98S0GS20130929.
25. Johnson, Ian. “Church-State Clash in China Coalesces around a
Toppled Spire.” New York Times (Wenzhou), May 29, 2014. Accessed
May 31, 2014.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/world/asia/church-state-clash-
in-china-coalesces-around-a-toppled-spire.html?hp&_r=0.
26. Wang, Hongyi. “China Plans Establishment of Christian
Theology.” China Daily, August 7, 2014. Accessed October 20, 2014.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-
08/07/content_18262848.htm.
27. Kaiman, Jonathan. “Going Undercover, the Evangelists Taking
Jesus to Tibet.” The Guardian, February 21, 2013. Accessed October
20, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/21/going-
undercover-christian-evangelists-tibet.

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 IV
Pushing Back

167
 Chapter 12
The Social Activists
It is probably fair to say no woman has ever taken more flak for
walking into a men’s room than Li Maizi.
In the run-up to Women’s Day in 2012, the feminist college
student was distressed by the one-to-one ratio of public restroom
facilities for males and females. She believed that women’s longer
wait times necessitated legislation to enforce giving women twice as
many toilets. Determined to correct the oversight, she organized
demonstrations for true “toilet parity.”
The “Occupy Men’s Room” movement involved some twenty
women who took over male public restrooms periodically over the
course of an hour in Guangzhou and Beijing. Outside they distributed
fliers and held signs with slogans like “Care for women, starting with
toilets.”
The two events were small and cheeky, causing no more trouble
than a little embarrassment for a few men. Most onlookers just
laughed it off and expressed support for the cause. Li Maizi did not
figure that her action could draw the wrath of authorities. She could
not have been more wrong.
“We didn’t think it was sensitive,” she laughed. “But I guess we
can’t gauge the risk since the government is so strange.”[1]
When I met Li a year after her Occupy movement, I could not
help but find it amusing that she had been considered a threat by
China’s vast “stability maintenance” apparatus. The petite twenty-
four-year-old with miniature top hat could easily have been mistaken
for a middle school student. Whether she was recounting one of her
quirky demonstrations or the childhood beatings she had endured,
she ended nearly every thought with a mischievous giggle.
Li was born in the rural outskirts of Beijing. She described her
mother as a sweet and caring woman who had endured pain her
entire life. Her father, on the other hand, she labeled a stubborn
chauvinist.
According to Li, her parents had been forced to marry young
after becoming pregnant with her. As a child, her father delivered
fertilizer for a farming company, but he was exceptionally unpopular
with his colleagues. He had narrowly failed the gaokao after high
school and remained perpetually bitter about the peasant’s
existence to which that failure had relegated him. So when his
company had to start laying off workers, he was one of the first to
go. A few years later, he was offered his job back, but he was too
proud to accept.
Li’s mother picked up the slack, moving to a distant part of

168
Beijing to work in a factory. Though she was bringing in the money
and even continued to do the housework when she was home, her
husband remained firmly in charge. His orders were nonnegotiable
and any affront by his wife or daughter resulted in a beating. Li
remembered getting thrashings for things as simple as writing with
her left hand rather than her right.
She would go on to a top-tier college in Xi’an, where she became
involved in activism and later set up a gender equality advocacy
network. By 2013 the group consisted of some two hundred active
volunteers around China, many of whom, like Li, had grown up
experiencing domestic violence. They advocated for equal-rights
legislation and highlighted discriminatory behavior in government
and businesses. But the work that made them famous was their
“performance art”—a term deliberately used to dodge the political
sensitivity of “protest.”
Their performances usually related to events that they
considered discriminatory, and they were designed to garner wide
attention on social media. On one occasion, they shaved their heads
to protest some universities’ practice of lowering admissions
standards for boys in order to maintain a gender balance with
higher-achieving girls. On another occasion, they went into action
after the Shanghai subway authority addressed a groping epidemic
on its trains by suggesting that women “have some self-respect” and
not dress so provocatively. A few volunteers proceeded to board the
subway wearing miniskirts, metal breast protectors, and signs saying
“I can be slutty, but you can’t get dirty.”[2]
The girls frequently rallied against domestic violence, which is
rampant in China. An official from the state-run All-China Women’s
Federation said that one-fourth of all Chinese women suffer abuse in
their marriage; in a separate survey, half of Chinese men admitted
to violence against their partners.[3]
Since 2001, China’s marriage law had specifically prohibited
“domestic violence,” but it failed to lay out any legal recourse or
even define what constituted abuse (though at the time of this
writing, comprehensive domestic abuse legislation had been drafted
and was awaiting approval by the National People’s Congress).[4] As
a result, police and courts remained hesitant to take on these cases
and tended to push couples to reconcile. “Some women get abused
for ten years, or even thirty years, because once she leaves her
husband, she might lose her home and children,” Li said. “That’s the
reason they don’t leave.”
On Valentine’s Day 2012, Li and two other volunteers decided to
call attention to the problem of domestic violence by wearing bridal

169
gowns splattered with red paint to resemble blood. They marched
down a crowded Beijing shopping street, holding signs and chanting
slogans like “Love is not an excuse for violence.” They jokingly
chided couples holding hands, warning them to be vigilant against
abuse.
The crowd was mostly receptive, but unlike their earlier
performances, the subject matter made some people uncomfortable.
A common saying in China reflects the traditional attitude: “Family
ugliness must not be aired” (jiachou buke waiyang). To many
Chinese men and women alike, beating is a normal part of marriage,
and it certainly is not something to be discussed outside the home.
“Many families had no humor,” Li recalled. “There were even some
chauvinists in China saying feminists are evil—that our group is evil.”
As they marched down the street, they were confronted by
chengguan (urban management officials) warning that they had not
registered their three-person demonstration. The officers followed
the women until they left.
The Occupy Men’s Room demonstration a few days later was
meant to address a less threatening gender-related issue that could
gain broad support. After all, long bathroom lines for women also
affect the men who accompany them. “In the beginning we thought
it was very humorous,” Li said.

Li Maizi holds a sign saying “Care for women, starting with toilets” during
Occupy Men’s Room.

170
 (Photo: Li Maizi)
Most people did see the humor. After the first event in
Guangzhou, the movement went viral on Weibo and started getting
international attention. By the time the Beijing demonstration rolled
around a week later, it was a media circus involving nearly every
major domestic and foreign news outlet in the city. Li gave interviews
under her “Li Maizi” public pseudonym, hoping that anonymity would
keep her under the radar. It did not.
Perhaps it was all the foreign media attention focused on China’s
gender issues. Perhaps it was bad timing, as the National People’s
Congress would meet the following week. Or perhaps Li’s ability to
organize large groups for public demonstrations seemed threatening.
She still is not completely sure why, but the Beijing event introduced
her to the suffocating grip of China’s “stability maintenance”
apparatus.
“Stability maintenance” euphemistically refers to the country’s
vast internal security network, tasked with stamping out any hint of
potential unrest. It includes multiple agencies and thousands of
offices overseeing surveillance, censorship, police, special
informants, community volunteers, and even contract thugs. The
system began in the late 1990s and evolved into an extremely well-
oiled machine in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Since 2010,
spending on the system has outstripped the country’s entire military
budget.[5]
The day of the Beijing Occupy performance, the propaganda
department sent directives for media to stop covering the event.
Then immediately after the demonstration, two plainclothes men
escorted Li to their unmarked car. Only their badges, without names
or numbers, identified them as police.
To Li’s surprise, the men took her to a fancy restaurant and
treated her to a feast. “The good thing is you can eat a big dinner,”
she giggled while recounting the story. “Stability maintenance has a
big budget for this sort of thing, and the standard for people like me
—the lowest, I think—is having to spend at least 600 yuan ($96) on
the meal.”
The officers kept her there for the rest of the day. They were
subtle in their message at first, telling Li that she was a smart girl
with a bright future ahead of her . . . provided that she avoided
trouble. Eventually, they got to the point and warned her to cease
her demonstrations, stop posting on Weibo, and stop giving
interviews.
Later that evening, six marked police cars with ten uniformed
officers pulled up to her parents’ home in rural Beijing. They took Li’s
terrified father to a restaurant, lavishing the same 600-yuan banquet

171
on him that his daughter had enjoyed. For him they even brought an
offer to the table, saying that if he could get Li to discontinue her
activities, they could arrange a cushy government job for her at the
local Women’s Federation. “If my family had something—such as if
we owned a factory—they could just threaten to shut it down,” Li
speculated. “But my family had nothing to lose, so they offered me a
job.”
Li’s father had always pushed her to try entering civil service
and was disappointed and humiliated when she instead delved into
feminist causes. But somehow, she now had a shortcut to his dream
dangling right in front of her. After living a simple rural life for so
long, he yearned to see his daughter enter the Golden Rice Bowl and
improve the family’s fortunes.
But Li did not bite. She continued giving interviews and kept
posting on Weibo, so authorities stepped up the pressure. They
showed up again and took her to their car, but there was no fancy
dinner this time; just a brief session of “good cop, bad cop.” They
told her that defying their orders constituted a betrayal of “trust
between friends.” They also wined and dined her father a few more
times, but it became clear that he had no power over her. She was
already planning the next demonstration.
For Women’s Day on March 8, 2012, she and her volunteers
slated an action in front of a Beijing government building in
opposition to invasive gynecological exams that female civil service
applicants were forced to undergo. This time, though, the authorities
were one step ahead of her. On the day when the demonstration was
to happen, Li phoned a friend to make final preparations. Within half
an hour, police showed up at her door. She would later realize that
they had tapped her phone and hacked her e-mail.
Li was brought to the police station for a long interrogation,
released, then awakened again early the next morning for another
session. Finally, the police invoked leverage that Li could not ignore
by calling her university in Xi’an, where she was still awaiting
graduation. The vice-dean of her department and her fudaoyuan
counselor were dispatched to retrieve her from Beijing. “My
counselor was proud of me,” Li said, “but told me I’d better stay at
school and read more books.”
The vice-dean told Li she needed to stay on campus and check in
regularly, but she would be given a token work-study position paying
120 yuan ($19) per month that is usually reserved for students from
low-income families. Li retorted, “How about I give you 120 yuan and
you give me my freedom!”
But by this point, the harassment was finally starting to wear on
her. She made a calculated decision to retreat to Xi’an, then

172
continue her demonstrations in the more open-minded city of
Guangzhou until the heat was off in Beijing.
Over the following months, authorities would still listen in on Li’s
phone calls and frequently called to check in, but she was largely left
alone outside Beijing. I asked whether her Occupy Men’s Room
experience had hampered her in any way. “Sometimes it bothered
me,” she replied. “But this thing passed, and now I’ll say it was just
one period of my life. Sometimes I’m scared, but I have some peers
backing me, so I’m not afraid of them.”
In an earlier era, a rabble-rouser like Li Maizi could have been
dealt with easily enough. The state could have held her entire future
ransom, or simply scared her straight by dispatching her to a labor
camp for a few years. But in today’s information age, Li’s network
gave her a measure of security.
Still, the “Occupy” experience gave Li a stark reminder that she
could push the envelope only so far. If political winds shifted or she
somehow crossed a line and the Communist Party felt that its
legitimacy had been questioned, it would not hesitate to bring the
hammer down hard. China’s labor camps and prisons house dozens
of activists just as influential as Li who focused their efforts on more
sensitive goals like democracy, Tibetan autonomy, or recognition for
Falun Gong.
Li’s case illustrated that even social movements pushing only
slightly controversial agendas tend to irk the Communist Party. “I
know what I do is a good thing,” Li told me. “But it’s hard to
communicate with the government because they’re biased against
nongovernmental organizations. They think they always make
trouble and are bad for society.”

Contrary to most of the young people it governs, the CCP has
been slow to embrace the rapidly emerging diversity in China. While
uneasiness over the organizational power of nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) is one reason why groups like Li’s get
harassed, there is a bit more to the story.
Wei Xiaogang, a prominent Chinese gay-rights activist and
filmmaker, told me that the government generally does not believe it
has failed to give people any of the rights they need, and it certainly
does not like being challenged. “I think they force people to think
collectively,” he said. “They want a very harmonious society. They
want everyone to be the same as everyone else.”[6]
Wei added that China’s feminist movement in particular suffers
because China’s elder male leaders are uncomfortable with gender
issues. Among the 204 leaders on the Communist Party’s all-

173
powerful Central Committee, only 10 were women as of 2014.[7]
In the same way that feminism challenges the traditional
patriarchal culture of China, Wei’s fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender (LGBT) rights challenges the country’s traditional
family structure. For Li Maizi, both issues are near and dear to her
heart and, in fact, closely linked to one another.
During her elementary and middle school years, Li realized that
she was attracted to other girls. She thought that she must have
some sort of illness. At the time, homosexuality was still classified as
a psychiatric disorder in China and was never discussed in textbooks
or media. But eventually Li went online and discovered that she was
not alone. “In high school about three or four friends knew my sexual
orientation,” she said. “But at that time, I just didn’t want others to
know.”
By the time Li entered college, homosexuality’s social stigma
had subsided enough that she fully embraced her sexuality and
came out to everyone—except her parents. While homosexuality
does not face the same degree of religious opposition in China as in
many Western countries, it can be considered an affront to the
Confucian notion of filial piety and continuing one’s family line.
Failing to marry and bear offspring in China is viewed as a slap in the
face to one’s parents.[8]
As with many social issues, the disparity in attitudes between
older and younger generations can present just as big a barrier to
progress as government resistance. Indeed, the two factors tend to
be intertwined.
Xin Ying, a twenty-seven-year-old lesbian from Wuhan and
program director of the Beijing LGBT Center, explained to me how
this dynamic played out in her own family. She was active in high-
profile public stunts to raise awareness for LGBT and gender issues,
including Occupy Men’s Room. But the demonstration that got her
the most attention occurred when she invited reporters to watch as
she and her girlfriend attempted to register for marriage at Beijing’s
Civil Affairs Bureau (where she was denied). After a picture of the
couple kissing outside the bureau was splashed across newspapers,
several family friends quietly mentioned it to her mother. “My mom
said, ‘You want me to go crazy! Why do you do such a disgusting
thing?’” Xin recalled.[9]
However, nobody dared say anything to the family’s patriarch.
Xin’s father was still under the impression that she was working for
an environmental NGO. Despite all her high-profile advocacy for
LGBT rights, she still could not discuss her sexuality directly with
him. “Maybe when I become stronger, I can come out to him,” she

174
said.
Xin explained that this perceived threat to family stability is what
irks the government most about the LGBT cause. “We all know
families are sort of the unit of society,” she said. “So if same-sex
couples can get married, it kind of destroys the traditional concept of
family. That’s why the government gets so upset about this.”
Though homosexuality has been perfectly acceptable on paper
for more than a decade, authorities have continued to crack down on
LGBT film festivals, parades, and clubs while censoring depictions of
homosexuals in entertainment. The country has yet to enact an
antidiscrimination law protecting LGBT individuals, let alone put gay
marriage up for debate in the National People’s Congress. In 2013,
police in the central city of Changsha went so far as to throw a
nineteen-year-old activist in jail for twelve days after he led a street
rally against homophobia.[10]
Ironically, the government’s attempt to maintain the status quo
may be causing more harm than good to “family stability.” Because
of the intense social pressure to marry and bear children, Chinese
homosexuals overwhelmingly enter heterosexual marriages. A
University of Shanghai sexologist estimated that 90 percent of gay
Chinese men marry unsuspecting straight women (compared to 15
to 20 percent in the United States).[11] Media periodically report
disasters sprouting from these loveless and sexless marriages,
ranging from bitter divorces to suicide.[12]
Many Chinese homosexuals have begun sidestepping these
problems through “cooperative marriages,” in which a gay man
marries a lesbian with the understanding that it is all an act for the
sake of family and career. This practice started gaining rapid
popularity in the early 2010s, with matchmaking websites emerging
to accommodate them. But these arrangements have their own
problems—such as whether to have a child and how the family
assets are divided—that tend to place a heavier burden on the
woman. And even in these sham marriages, domestic abuse still
occurs.
This is one reason why Li Maizi chose to focus primarily on
women’s rights. While LGBT issues are a major concern for her, she
felt that gay men had greater political advantages. For example,
they have been able to piggyback on the less sensitive HIV/AIDS
prevention movement to get media attention and face time with
government officials. Lesbians, however, have few avenues to raise
their voice and even feel disrespected by male gay-rights activists. “I
realized that if gender discrimination can’t be wiped out in China,
then there’s no lesbian movement,” Li said.

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 Like Xin Ying, Li was very hesitant to reveal her sexuality to her
family. She finally worked up the nerve to tell her mother during
college and was relieved to learn that she had already known for a
decade. Her father was less accepting, though. He found out when
documentary filmmakers accidentally let the secret slip while
shooting at their home.
Even though well aware that his daughter was gay, he still
pressured her to get married and have kids. She resisted and then
went a step further by suggesting that if he had any interest in
working, he could get paid to give speeches about having a lesbian
daughter. The suggestion infuriated him. “Now he just doesn’t ask
about it,” Li said. “I’m out of his control now. He used to beat me but
now he can’t. I’m grown up and can resist, so he just says I’m trash
and other mean words.”
When I spoke with Li, she was trying to persuade her mother to
get a divorce, and for years had been pushing her to speak up for
herself more. “But there’s a generation gap,” Li lamented. “My mom
thinks there’s no absolute gender equality.”
Li said she sympathizes with women who do not fight back
against abuse and discrimination. To some extent, she even
sympathizes with men like her father, whom society educated to be
the way they are. “But that’s the reason I need to stand now,” she
added. “This society needs young people to speak out—to point out
the fact that the genders in China are unequal. This is social
advocacy and policy advocacy. Nature is very hard to change, but
the policy is very easy to change.”

Policy was indeed changing. It is impossible to know how much
the changes are the result of campaigns like Li’s, but it is hard to
discount the connection.
Soon after the Occupy Men’s Room protests, several major city
governments began suggesting (and in some cases even legislating)
that new buildings have more toilet facilities for women than for
men.[13] Then, after the feminist volunteers targeted companies
responsible for job advertisements that discriminated against
women, several were fined by the Beijing government.
These successes motivated Li more than “stability maintenance”
discouraged her. A few weeks before I met her in 2013, the Sichuan
Supreme Court in Chengdu had upheld the death sentence for a
woman who had killed her husband during a beating session after
years of abuse at his hands. Li and the volunteers organized a
petition to stop the execution and were even so bold as to protest
outside the courthouse. But always mindful of the need to be
strategic, they demonstrated on a day when court was not in session

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and police were not on hand. In the end, the execution was quietly
canceled and the following year the sentence was completely
overturned in a “landmark” case.[14]
While the Communist Party once appeared to be an omnipresent
and all-powerful monolith, young people pushing for social change
today have little memory of the bloodshed in Tiananmen. And today
they are finding strength in numbers online. These changes have
made the CCP seem a more vulnerable, though certainly still
formidable, force to contend with. Youth activists are finding that,
even if they threaten the Party by pushing for particular social
changes, they sometimes get their wish rather than a prison
sentence.
Still, young social activists like Li Maizi, though apparently
growing in number, represent a tiny fraction of Chinese youth. “Most
of my generation is afraid to speak up,” she said. “They feel helpless
and don’t do anything. But I don’t want to blame them because
there’s actually no real law that protects their rights.”
Li points to worries that the government might use violence on
students again if it felt threatened. The conformist education that
numbs Chinese to activism is another problem. To express a different
opinion is risky; to actively organize others to protest on behalf of
that opinion is downright dangerous with little tangible benefit.
But to Li, the most compelling disincentive for youth to engage
in political activity is that it presents a distraction from their primary
pursuit: money. “If you can earn more money, you are successful,”
she said. “We don’t educate people to chase their dreams; we just
need to make more money. In China, we’re just chasing GDP.”
Li echoed the regrets often expressed over the lagging political
consciousness of Chinese youth, saying that abstract social progress
tends to be a low priority next to the many immediate pressures
they face. “If you want to chase your dream, you’ll have a low
salary,” she said. “You’ll have no time to get a higher position. If
you’re a man, you must marry and you must have a house and a car.
So it’s big pressure. For me, it’s very hard to ask the post-90s
generation to chase their dreams.”
Since graduating from college, Li had been working for a
(technically illegal) gender equality NGO in Beijing with a paltry
monthly income of 3,000 yuan ($480)—less than what most migrant
laborers in the city made. Still, there was nowhere else she would
rather be. “Places like Switzerland or Taiwan already have good
gender equality—[they are] maybe thirty years ahead of us,” she
said. “Moving there would be nice, but there’s not much I could do to
help there. I love China; I just don’t love the government.”
“Change is step by step,” Li continued. “But we must push it.

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Some people say there can’t be absolute gender equality, so there’s
no point in fighting for it. But if you fight for something, it shouldn’t
be because you think it can be achieved. You should fight for it
because it’s right.”
1. Maizi, Li. Interview by author, Beijing, March 2013.
2. Gao, Jing. “Shanghai Metro Blames Sexual Harassment on
Women’s Immodest Clothing: Netizens’ Reaction.” Ministry of Tofu,
June 26, 2012. Accessed May 23, 2014.
http://www.ministryoftofu.com/2012/06/shanghai-metro-blames-
sexual-harassment-on-womens-immodest-clothing-netizens-
reaction/.
3. “Quarter of Chinese Women Suffer Domestic Violence.” Xinhua
(Beijing), November 26, 2013. Accessed May 23, 2014.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013-
11/26/content_17133231.htm; Wang, Xiangxian, Gang Fang, and
Hongtao Li. Research on Gender-Based Violence and Masculinities in
China: Quantitative Findings. Institute of Sexuality and Gender
Studies at Beijing Forestry University and the Anti-Domestic Violence
Network, with support from UNFPA China and Partners for Prevention,
2013.
4. Standing Committee of the Ninth National People’s Congress.
Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China. 2001.
http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/Law/2007-
12/13/content_1384064.htm; “China Mulls Family Abuse Law.”
Xinhua, November 25, 2014. Accessed November 25, 2014.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-
11/25/c_133813641.htm.
5. Forsythe, Michael. “China’s Spending on Internal Police Force in
2010 Outstrips Defense Budget.” Bloomberg, March 6, 2011.
Accessed May 23, 2014. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-
06/china-s-spending-on-internal-police-force-in-2010-outstrips-
defense-budget.html.
6. Wei, Xiaogang. Interview by author, Beijing, March 2013.
7. Tatlow, Didi. “Why Do Men Dominate Chinese Politics? Because
They’re ‘Just Too Superb.’” New York Times, March 13, 2014.
Accessed May 23, 2014.
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/why-do-men-
dominate-chinese-politics-because-theyre-just-too-superb/?
_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1&.
8. Neilands, Torsten, Wayne Steward, and Kyung-Hee Choi.
“Assessment of Stigma Towards Homosexuality in China: A Study of
Men Who Have Sex with Men.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 37, no. 5
(2008): 838–44.
9. Xin, Ying. Interview by author, Beijing, August 2013.

178
10. Jiang, Steven. “In China, Activists Fight for Gay Marriage.” CNN
(Shangfang), n.d. Accessed June 30, 2013.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/27/world/asia/china-gay-rights-jiang.
11. Balenieri, Raphael. “Taboos Push China’s Gay Men to Wed
Women.” Al Jazeera, April 1, 2013. Accessed October 21, 2014.
http://m.aljazeera.com/story/201331993139528103.
12. Hu, Qingyun. “Gay Husband Committed No Fraud: Court.” Global
Times, January 8, 2013. Accessed October 21, 2014.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/754400.shtml.
13. “China’s ‘Occupy’ Toilet Protests Spread.” Agence France Presse,
February 24, 2012. Accessed November 7, 2014.
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/150969/chinas-occupy-toilet-protests-
spread.
14. Boehler, Patrick. “Death Sentence Overturned in ‘Landmark’
Chinese Domestic Violence Case.” South China Morning Post, June
24, 2014. Accessed October 21, 2014.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1539450/death-
sentence-overturned-landmark-chinese-domestic-violence-case?
page=all.

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 Chapter 13
The Environmentalists
Nobody is quite sure who instigated what would become the
largest “illegal” protest in China since 1989, but whoever it was
launched something further-reaching than they ever anticipated.
It was the summer of 2007, and coastal Xiamen was preparing to
build a massive petrochemical plant that promised to double the
city’s GDP. The plant had all the relevant government approvals to
produce paraxylene (PX), a chemical used in everything from
polyester to plastic bottles, but the environmental assessments had
been illegally withheld from the public.
In late May, as local residents were complaining loudly about the
controversial plant, an unidentified person circulated an explosive
text message. “Once this extremely poisonous chemical is produced,
it will be like an atomic bomb for the people of Xiamen,” it read. “We
will have leukemia and deformed babies. We want to live, we want to
be healthy!”[1] The message, which was eventually forwarded to
more than a million people, ended with a call for public protest on
June 1.
The dangers mentioned in the text were exaggerated, and much
of the worry came from an inaccurate rumor that PX was the same
type of chemical responsible for a disastrous explosion in
northeastern China two years earlier. Local television stations and
newspapers undertook a propaganda blitz to dissuade people from
these notions, but few trusted the state-controlled media. The
government began to grow seriously worried about the possibility of
people taking to the streets, especially on the eve of the June 4
Tiananmen Square anniversary. So leaders at the very top of China’s
central government ordered the project suspended. But this still was
not enough.
On June 1, some ten thousand residents took to Xiamen’s
streets. Marching past government buildings, they wore yellow
ribbons and held signs decrying the project’s developer and the local
Communist Party chief. Temporary suspension of the project would
not suffice—they wanted it booted out of town forever. Anxious to
prevent more young students from joining in, the government
dispatched paramilitary forces to guard the gates of Xiamen
University, but this move only prompted protests to break out there.
[2]
The demonstrations dispersed the following day, but the
protesters got their wish. The plant was moved out of the city
altogether.
The Xiamen anti-PX movement, unprecedented in China,

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became a catalyst for youth-driven environmental activism. In the
following years, comparably large “not in my backyard” protests
would hit several more cities while online movements against
everything from air pollution to soil contamination also took shape. It
was the beginning of an awakening for tech-savvy, middle-class
youth starting to demand more from life than unrestrained economic
growth.

One of these youth was Wei Hanyang. He was twenty-four years
old when I met him in 2013 in his hometown of Guangzhou, where
he had started an environmental NGO a few months earlier. “It’s
because of the growth in civil awareness,” he said of the protests
that began with Xiamen. “It also shows that the environmental
sector isn’t as sensitive as other things. People’s Daily and CCTV will
even talk about it. That’s why I see potential here.”[3]
Born to an upper-middle-class family, Hanyang spent his
childhood vacations traveling throughout the country with his
parents, visiting everything from the mountains of Tibet to the
forests of Sichuan. “I traveled to so many beautiful places,” he
recalled. “But I also saw a lot of damage. I guess many people don’t
feel urgency about environmental issues because they haven’t seen
them and felt the problems.”
China’s “economic miracle” that saw thirty years of double-digit
GDP growth has left a legacy of environmental destruction that
remains unresolved. The statistics are frightening. About half of the
rivers that existed in China in 1990 have already dried up, and of
those rivers and lakes that remain, about 75 percent are “severely
polluted.”[4] Meanwhile, an estimated 20 percent of the country’s
arable land is contaminated, threatening an already scarce food
supply.[5] The country’s carbon emissions, already the highest in the
world, are not projected to peak for another two decades.[6] All but a
small handful of China’s major cities fail to meet air pollution
standards, and its countryside is dotted with over four hundred
villages harboring abnormally high cancer rates.[7] The list goes on
and on.
For Hanyang, the issue that first grabbed his attention was
dams. Traveling to the upper Yangtze River, he saw hydropower
projects ripping apart the serene forests and threatening to upend
the surrounding people and wildlife.
Like most Chinese parents, Hanyang’s wanted him to go into a
stable and lucrative line of work. He agreed to follow in his father’s
footsteps and study finance and economics. In retrospect, it was a
good choice. “I like economics because it tells me a lot about

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incentive schemes—why people do one thing but not another,”
Hanyang said. “That’s highly related to environmental issues.”
He studied at Hong Kong University, where he was exposed to
information usually censored in mainland China, gaining a better
sense of the economic and political factors contributing to the
environmental crisis. But even on the mainland, many young
Chinese have opportunities to learn about environmental
responsibility during their college years. Clubs and startup NGOs
have sprouted up on nearly every campus, with scores of students
volunteering—some out of a real sense of civic duty, others seeking
to boost their résumés. The first group with which Hanyang became
involved was the China Youth Climate Action Network (CYCAN), a
nationwide collaboration of college students originally formed to
encourage energy efficiency in Chinese universities.
During this time, Hanyang revisited the issue that had awakened
his environmental consciousness when a Hong Kong newspaper
asked him to write about dam projects in southwest China. At the
time, the region’s three major river systems—the Nu, Mekong, and
Yangtze—
already had thirty-two major dams, but another hundred were under
construction or proposed. An indefinite suspension of these projects,
instituted by Premier Wen Jiabao in 2004 due to environmental
concerns, appeared to be expiring as his term drew to an end in
2012. Developers and local officials licked their lips at all the
hydropower potential and were keen to make up for lost time.[8]

Wei Hanyang stands atop a dam on the upper Mekong River.

(Photo: Wei Hanyang)
What Hanyang found in his investigation of the construction
projects shocked him. He saw the excavation of mountains, tainted
waters, destroyed ecosystems, and sleepy villages along the river
banks that would soon be submerged. “Few people know about the
hydropower schemes,” Hanyang said. “Almost no media talk about

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it.”
In the 1990s and 2000s, the government had loudly boasted of
its gargantuan Three Gorges project—the largest dam in the world—
expecting that this engineering triumph would be a source of
national pride. “But the result was that people were doubtful about
it,” Hanyang recalled. “Now they turn to a new strategy: keep a low
profile. So [the level of] transparency is very bad.”[9]
The experience showed Hanyang that, for any change to occur,
public awareness of environmental issues was essential. To this end,
he was inspired to set up his own NGO.
In 2002, China passed an Environmental Impact Assessment
(EIA) law mandating that when the government is ready to approve a
project its assessments must be disclosed to the public.[10] This is
the law that was ignored in the Xiamen PX plant project. Hanyang
noticed that, as with most such laws, enforcement was terrible. In
many cases, projects were mentioned in fine print in obscure
newspapers or on websites that nobody actually read, allowing
officials and developers to claim that they had satisfied the
disclosure requirement with no public objections.
This strategy was used frequently in Hanyang’s native
Guangzhou and the rest of the Pearl River delta as new
developments continued to sprout up in increasingly fragile areas.
“The environmental capacity of this area is almost at the edge,”
Hanyang said. “But Guangdong still wants to push so much
development. It’s the GDP logic of the whole mainland.”

The aim of Hanyang’s new NGO, known as the Cross-Border
Environment Concern Association (CECA), was to ensure proper
public disclosure regarding these projects so that people could raise
objections if they wished. In other words, it was intended to help
achieve the aim of an existing ordinance. In many countries,
Hanyang could have simply registered his new entity and gone
straight to work. But the Chinese government, wary of grassroots
organizations, made things more complicated.
Increasingly receptive to NGOs’ assistance where official
resources are stretched thin, the government has given the go-
ahead to thousands of environmental NGOs over the past two
decades. But registration remains a lengthy, precarious process
involving numerous bureaus and years of patience. Chinese leaders
still harbor fears that NGOs might allow people to more efficiently
organize resistance against the government or be used by “hostile
foreign forces” as a Trojan horse into China.[11] Even after getting
approval, groups remain subject to restrictions on public fundraising,

183
accepting foreign money, and setting up interprovincial branch
offices that connect people from across the country. Because of
these obstacles, many groups instead choose to register as a
business under a special “civil nonenterprise” category. “This is a
special word created by China,” Hanyang explained with a laugh.
“You just accept it.”
Fortunately for him, the relatively progressive cities of
Guangzhou and Shenzhen simplified the NGO process in 2012,
allowing easier independent registration through a single bureau
(similar reforms have since unfolded in other provinces as well). This
was the final impetus he needed to launch his NGO.
Many others, though, are less fortunate. Beijing-based CYCAN,
with which Hanyang remained affiliated, was still waiting for
approval of its NGO status after six years. This lack of formal
approval made getting government support for projects difficult and
left the organization vulnerable should someone in authority ever
decide that CYCAN was a nuisance.
Li Lina, a post-80s Anhui native who worked with CYCAN and
several other environmental organizations, described the love-hate
relationship between these entities and the authorities. Often,
certain quarters of the government are happy to collaborate with
nonprofit groups; CYCAN had been praised and approached for
dialogues by local environmental bureaus and China’s powerful
National Development and Reform Commission. But the security
apparatus remained suspicious. Lina guessed that her group still
could not get registered partly because some former members had
been placed on a blacklist for publicizing cancer villages. “It depends
on individuals,” she said. “But these people just don’t get why NGOs
want to get involved. They think we might be a channel to criticize
the government and only see us as opposition.”[12]
At this stage, she and Hanyang both found it necessary to take a
cooperative rather than antagonistic approach with the authorities
and the companies causing environmental degradation. In a sea of
powerful leaders and special interests, a small NGO with ambiguous
legality stirring the pot too forcefully could put its members and its
own existence at risk.[13] When I first reached out to Hanyang, he
even downplayed the idea that he was an “environmentalist,” saying
that this was a loaded term in China. He simply described himself as
working on very practical community problems.
Lina contrasted her work with the approach taken by Western
NGOs like Greenpeace, which tend to take an adversarial approach
with polluters. She called herself a “realist idealist”—keen to change
things, but aware of the sociopolitical realities that mandate a slower

184
transition from China’s growth model. For her, the choices are to
work within the government’s terms or not at all.
At the same time, though, more antagonistic grassroots
movements were achieving undeniable gains. When smog consumed
Beijing in 2011, an Internet campaign prompted the local
government to start publishing air pollution data.[14] In 2013, when
the Ministry of Land and Resources declared national soil pollution
data to be a “state secret,” an online uproar eventually prompted
the information’s release.[15] Then there were the street protests. It
is unlikely that officials ever would have budged on proceeding with
lucrative chemical projects had the only resistance been a gentle
nudge from small environmental groups.
“It raises strong questions among NGOs,” Lina said. “Citizens are
moving ahead while we’re sort of lagging behind. As an NGO in
China, you’re constantly questioning what impact you can actually
have.”
Still, Lina stressed that achieving meaningful change requires
more from young people than joining a one-time protest. A chemical
plant in their backyard gets people involved for a day, but that does
not do much for less visible issues that require sustained attention,
like deforestation and ecosystem breakdown. However, far fewer
young people are willing to make this sort of commitment.
Like Hanyang, Lina was also compelled to devote herself to the
environment because of travel—in her case, a trip to Antarctica that
she was awarded during college. “You see the most beautiful place in
the world that’s going to be destroyed by climate change,” she
recalled. “You gain a stronger heart for what you want to be and
what you want to do.”

Li Lina during a trip to Antarctica.

(Photo: Li Lina)
She studied diplomacy and politics at Renmin University and

185
later, as a graduate student, at Peking University—the quality of
education that most young Chinese can only wish for. Upon
graduation she accepted a lucrative job in sales and marketing for a
foreign oil company. It was a dream come true for her family.
But Lina was unfulfilled, and she quit after eighteen months to
go into NGO work, focusing on climate change and civic
engagement. “My mom wasn’t so happy about me quitting my job,”
she said. “Many families in China judge your job based on how much
money you get. We had a big fight when I quit.”
In the end, her mother relented after realizing that Lina’s NGO
salary was decent and that she could travel to international
conferences. “That’s good for her; she thinks it’s fancy,” Lina
chuckled. “But some NGO employees have maybe half my salary. If I
were there, it wouldn’t be so easy for her to accept it.”
Financial compensation is a key problem confronting civic-
minded Chinese youth who might want to pursue careers in social
advocacy. NGOs tend to be understaffed and underfunded
everywhere in the world, and even more so when just obtaining
official recognition is a great struggle. For bright young Chinese
seeking to have a social impact, this means working long hours for
low pay and low status—a tough situation to accept in China’s
expensive cities. “For Germans, it’s a matter of living a good life or
better life,” Lina said. “For us, it’s life or death. I think in Beijing you
need 4,000 yuan ($640) per month just to survive.”
Over recent years Lina had watched with encouragement as the
number of young people wanting to get involved with environmental
initiatives grew rapidly. But many, after a short period of
involvement, would say that their parents were pressuring them to
leave environmentalism to do something more lucrative. “On one
hand I sympathize with their choice, because it’s not easy to make a
living in China,” she said. “But on the other hand, I feel it’s a pity
that they don’t try more before they make this decision. Many give
up on their first [NGO] job after graduation.”
Lina lamented that most of her friends work only for money and
live only for their lover, rather than finding some kind of greater
purpose—be it environmentalism or something else. “The trip to
Antarctica struck my heart so much that I couldn’t ignore the deeper
calling,” she said. “When I worked for [the oil company], I had this
constant internal quarrel saying I needed to do climate change
work.”

Along with economic challenges, the lure of foreign lands also
appears to be impeding youth involvement in Chinese
environmentalism. The middle-class lifestyle and access to

186
information that push young people to care more about their
environment also enable them to go elsewhere if it is not to their
liking. When Hanyang studied at Hong Kong University, there were
three hundred mainland Chinese students in his program. These
students were highly sought after—exactly the caliber of people
needed in China’s environmental sector, or in any other field for that
matter. But upon graduation, only seven of the three hundred
returned to the mainland.
Hanyang was one of the seven. He had plenty of opportunities in
Hong Kong and a number of foreign countries. Even his parents felt
he might be better off elsewhere. But in the end, he felt he could
have the biggest impact in China.
This trend was hardly unique to his class. Great numbers of
highly capable people have been leaving China, often citing
environmental concerns as a major reason. In early 2013, Beijing
experienced a so-called airpocalypse when air pollution levels
reached twenty-five times the limit deemed safe by the World Health
Organization. After this event and other periods of intense smog,
agencies facilitating emigration reported spikes in business of as
much as 300 percent. One agent who specialized in emigration to
Australia told the Global Times that 80 percent of his customers
cited pollution as their top concern, with education and the legal
system the next two most frequent drivers.[16] A 2014 survey
reiterated these trends when it found that 64 percent of wealthy
Chinese were in the process of emigrating or said they planned to
emigrate in the future.[17]
These issues have been covered extensively by Chinese media,
which routinely warn of a brain drain and capital flight amounting to
hundreds of billions of dollars each year. To Hanyang, though, the
scariest implication is not necessarily the loss of money and talent,
but what he labeled an “optimism outflow.”
If China were an inescapable pool, he explained, then everyone
would be motivated to fix its pollution and social justice problems.
“But if these people have the choice to leave the pool, then they
won’t care anymore,” he said. “If everyone grows up for the sole
purpose of going abroad, that leaves your society in a very difficult
dilemma.”
Ironically, China’s authoritarian system is frequently compared
favorably to less efficient Western democracies on environmental
issues. The centralized government’s ability to quickly divert
massive resources without resistance has indeed made it the world’s
top investor in green energy. But this investment has been likened to
eating both Slimfast and KFC and calling it a diet. Alongside green

187
energy initiatives, China is still increasing its consumption of coal as
part of an overall strategy to satisfy its growing energy needs.
Furthermore, the central government is hardly as powerful as
outsiders tend to assume. Special interests like the auto and oil
industries exert tremendous influence on government decisions, and
in many cases they play a dual role as regulators of the very same
industries that they profit from.[18] Their state-owned nature makes
the marriage of vested interests, money, and politics even closer
than in the West. Untangling these webs requires a degree of
political will that few Chinese leaders have demonstrated.
Even when the central government does enact good
environmental policies, it has little power to enforce them all the way
down the bureaucracy to the nation’s tens of thousands of local
governments, each with their own economic aims and vested
interests. In his book When a Billion Chinese Jump, environmental
journalist Jonathan Watts described how weak governance and
pollution go hand in hand: “China’s political system is neither
dictatorship nor democracy. For the environment, it contains the
worst elements of both. At the top, the state lacks the authority to
impose pollution regulations and wildlife conservation laws, while at
the bottom citizens lack the democratic tools of a free press,
independent courts, and elections to defend their land, air and
water.”[19]
The dilemma facing the Communist Party today is how to
balance the economic development that maintains its legitimacy
along with mitigating the environmental costs also threatening that
legitimacy. Educated, tech-savvy youth tend to acknowledge the
benefits that China’s rapid economic development has brought
them, but they worry about the impact on their health and quality of
life. “I admit even my family has benefited hugely from the
economic development,” Lina told me. “[My grandma] lives a happy
life that she never could have imagined before. I’m not one who says
all the development is crap and we shouldn’t do it. But even though
your family benefits, there are others who suffer.”

In spite of China’s green initiatives, blooming NGOs, and growing
numbers of bold activists, things appear likely to get worse before
they get better. Desertification continues to claim hundreds of
square miles of land each year, threatening millions of farmers and
even the capital city. Some fifty thousand new cars were sold every
day in 2013 and the country’s coal usage will soon surpass that of
the rest of the world combined, keeping city skies black.[20] If
present trends continue, China will lack one-fourth of the water it

188
needs by 2030 as demand quickly outpaces supply.[21] The effect
this will have on prices is a scary thought for all those already
struggling to get by.
Given this potentially bleak future, it is not hard to see why
many with the means are creating an exit plan for themselves. But
for the vast majority of Chinese who stay, the unfolding
environmental crisis will likely continue to cause more dissatisfaction
and foment additional protests. If so, protesters may start finding
authorities less accommodating than those in Xiamen.
In 2012, a student-led demonstration against a local copper
plant in Shifang, Sichuan, involving tens of thousands of people
turned violent. State media claimed that students rushed a
government building and started overturning police cars. Riot police
ended the fracas with batons and tear gas, leaving scores bloody
and battered. Dozens were subsequently arrested (though the plant
was ultimately canceled).[22]
In Maoming, Guangdong, in 2014, an anti-PX demonstration
involving thousands also provoked a violent police reaction that,
according to some accounts, may have left some dead. A local
protester commented on Weibo, “All that’s left now is a road to
death. For our offspring, it’s all worth it.”[23]

Protesters at an anti-PX demonstration in Kunming, 2013.

(Photo: Southbysoutheast.com)
Environmental demonstrations are nothing new in China. Ever
since reforms began, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of
local protests each year against polluting developers and officials.
The two factors that made Xiamen a turning point, though, were size
and demographics. Quickly alerted through technology and easily
moved into the streets by the collective excitement of their peer
groups, young students unencumbered by jobs and families were at
the forefront of these urban protests.
As with fervent young protesters in any country, the novelty,
adrenaline rush, and the excitement of a rebellious movement were

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probably just as instrumental in drawing people to the
demonstrations as the environmental issues themselves. And given
the misinformation and rumors that tend to precede these events, it
is probably safe to assume that not all of the young participants
were well informed about what they were protesting.
Regardless of their motivations and understanding, however,
these demonstrations carry significance beyond the immediate
environmental issues at hand. The fact that young people feel safe
enough to take to the streets against authorities in such great
numbers surely makes China’s leaders lose sleep at night. It
suggests that the fear tactics on which the Communist Party relies to
keep firm control of the country’s hot-headed youth are losing their
luster.
Joshua Rosenzweig, a human-rights researcher who has
chronicled dissent in China since 2002, told me that one of the
unintended consequences of the state-induced amnesia regarding
the bloodbath of 1989 might be that post-80s and post-90s youth
have a relatively benign view of the Communist Party. “I do think
that there’s a generational factor in terms of recognizing the state’s
ability or willingness to use violence against the people,” he said.[24]
For Chinese youth who have grown up largely unaffected by
political upheaval while taking basic freedoms and economic security
for granted, worrisome quality-of-life issues are beginning to
outweigh the diminishing might of Big Brother. “Popular expectations
about good and clean governance, transparency, participation, etc.
will most likely continue to outpace the authorities’ willingness and
ability to accommodate them,” Rosenzweig said. “Continued conflict
is inevitable, and I wouldn’t rule out another massive show of force
at some point in the future.”

As we sat outside a Beijing coffee shop, Lina spoke of how young
NGO workers like herself and the bolder groups of grassroots
activists were complementing one another to push things in the right
direction. “What I do helps me understand how important this
generation is and how important this country is,” she said. “By
nature, we won’t be ignored by the world or history.”
However, she constantly worries whether it will be enough. She
invoked a common phrase that was popular under Mao: “People will
triumph over nature” (rendingshengtian). “That’s why a lot of people
think we can make it,” she said. “But frankly, I’m worried because of
China’s size and cumulative power. Scientists say there’s a tipping
point that we can’t come back from.”
Lina paused and looked upward as she quietly trailed off in an
unfinished thought. “But as an environmentalist, if I believe that . . .”

190
 Hanyang expressed a similar uncertainty about China’s future
that he would rather just not think about. Like Lina, all he can do is
play his small role and hope that enough people like him can guide
the country through the unprecedented challenges threatening to
spiral out of control. When I asked about the Communist Party’s
ability to lead the nation through these challenges, he reiterated that
he was committed to working within the system and helping to
better enforce existing laws. “But to some extent there are some big
issues inherent in the system itself,” he admitted. “If we don’t
overthrow it, perhaps some problems can never be settled.”
1. Landsberg, Mitchell. “China City Gets the (Text) Message.” Los
Angeles Times, June 1, 2007. Accessed October 23, 2014.
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jun/01/world/fg-china1.
2. Geall, Sam. China and the Environment. London: Zed Books, 2013,
149.
3. Wei, Hanyang. Interview by author, Guangzhou, November 2013.
4. Hamlin, Kevin. “China Coal-Fired Economy Dying of Thirst as Mines
Lack Water.” Bloomberg, July 24, 2013. Accessed May 23, 2014.
http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/556406?
type=bloomberg.
5. Wu, Wensong. “Quality of Arable Land ‘Worrying.’” China Daily,
April 18, 2014.
6. McGrath, Matt. “China’s Experts Divided over Carbon Emissions
Peak.” BBC News, June 5, 2014. Accessed October 23, 2014.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27538716.
7. Wang, Qian. “Big Cities Fail to Meet Air Standards.” China Daily,
March 9, 2014. Accessed October 23, 2014.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014npcandcppcc/2014-
03/09/content_17333356.htm; Watts, Jonathan. “China’s ‘Cancer
Villages’ Reveal Dark Side of Economic Boom.” The Guardian, June 6,
2010. Accessed October 23, 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jun/07/china-cancer-
villages-industrial-pollution.
8. Chen, Yong, and Liangbing Xie. “’’” [Making Up for the ‘Lost 5
Years’]. Economic Observer, December 31, 2010, 11.
9. For further reading see Lee, Yuen-Ching. “Global Capital, National
Development and Transnational Environmental Activism: Conflict and
the Three Gorges Dam.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 43, no. 1
(2013): 102–26.
10. The Standing Committee of the Ninth National People’s
Congress. Environmental Impact Assessment Law of the People’s
Republic of China. 2002.
http://api.commissiemer.nl/docs/os/sea/legislation/china_s_ea_legislation_03.pdf
11. Cao, Siqi. “Guangzhou OKs Foreign Cash for NGOs.” Global

191
Times, November 7, 2014. Accessed November 12, 2014.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/890525.shtml.
12. Li, Lina. Interview by author, Beijng, September 2013.
13. For further reading see Van Rooij, Benjamin. “The People vs.
Pollution: Understanding Citizen Action against Pollution in China.”
Journal of Contemporary China 19, no. 63 (2010): 55–77.
14. Larson, Christina. “How the Internet Is Powering the Fight against
Beijing’s Dirty Air.” The Guardian, April 10, 2012. Accessed October
23, 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/10/internet-
beijing-dirty-air-pollution.
15. Chin, Josh, and Brian Spegele. “China Details Vast Extent of Soil
Pollution.” Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2014. Accessed October 20,
2014.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023046263045795070405570462
16. Yang, Jingjie. “Smog Pushes Emigration.” Global Times, February
27, 2014. Accessed May 29, 2014.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/845032.shtml.
17. Hurun Report, and Visa Consulting Group. “” [China
Investment Immigration White Paper]. 2014.
http://up.hurun.net/Humaz/201406/20140606132055085.pdf.
18. See Van Rooij, “The People vs. Pollution.”
19. Watts, Jonathan. When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will
Save the World—or Destroy It. London: Faber, 2010, 107.
20. “China Consumes Nearly as Much Coal as the Rest of the World
Combined.” U.S. Energy Information Administration, January 29,
2013. http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=9751; Young,
Angelo. “China New Auto Sales 2013: Chinese Consumers Bought
over 20 Million Vehicles in 2013 as Foreign Automakers Jockey for
Market Share.” International Business Times, January 7, 2014.
Accessed July 25, 2014. http://www.ibtimes.com/china-new-auto-
sales-2013-chinese-consumers-bought-over-20-million-vehicles-
2013-foreign-automakers.
21. Yang, “Smog Pushes Emigration.”
22. Shi, Jiangtao. “Factory Axed as Shifang Heeds Protesters’ Calls.”
South China Morning Post, July 4, 2012.
23. Wang, Natalie. “Violent Protests Erupt in Maoming, Four Allegedly
Killed as Police Seal the City.” Nanfang Insider, March 31, 2014.
24. Rosenzweig, Joshua. E-mail interview by author, April 2014.

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 Chapter 14
The Journalists
On the night of July 23, 2011, one of China’s sleek new bullet
trains barreled through Wenzhou, Zhejiang, with 558 passengers.
Several miles away, lightning had struck a metal signaling box,
bringing a separate train with over a thousand people to a halt on
the track ahead. By the time the conductor noticed it looming large
through his windshield, it was too late. The crash threw four coaches
off a 65-foot-high viaduct, killing forty.
In the immediate aftermath, authorities clung to the standard
response: cover up and downplay. Propaganda directives were sent
to media outlets with strict instructions not to question or elaborate
on official reports, but instead to promote “great love in the face of
tragedy.”[1]
But many suspected what would eventually be confirmed: the
accident was not just the result of bad weather. Untrained railway
workers and faulty communication systems sprouting from
corruption and overzealous development at the Ministry of Railways
were also at fault.[2]
Web censors tried to prevent critical discussion by social media
users, but it was hopeless. “When a country is so corrupt that one
lightning strike can cause a train crash . . . none of us are exempt,”
read one of the most retweeted Weibo messages. “China today is a
train rushing through a lightning storm . . . we are all passengers.”[3]
Less than twenty-four hours after the accident, workers were told
to halt rescue operations. Soon afterward, a video of backhoes
attempting to break apart and bury one of the train coaches
surfaced. It appeared that officials were literally trying to bury the
story. Even more dramatically, hours after the rescue search was
called off, a two-year-old baby was discovered alive in the wreckage.
At a subsequent press conference, a hapless railways spokesman
told noticeably angry reporters that it was simply “a miracle.”[4]
Authorities were widely ridiculed and condemned online, and
attempts to censor the debacle only magnified it. In one fell swoop,
the government had struck a powerful blow against its own
credibility. It was one of the first major incidents in which microblogs
shattered the Party’s monopoly power over the public narrative.
The widely available information circulating online opened the
door for more aggressive traditional media coverage. In defiance of a
second propaganda directive to cease all critical reporting, the
Economic Observer (EO) newspaper printed an eight-page feature
one week after the accident, including a scathing commentary. “Yiyi,

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when you’ve grown up and started to understand this world, how
should we explain to you everything that happened on July 23,
2011?” it said, speaking to the two-year-old child who had been
found. “They called your survival a miracle, but how do we explain it
to you: When respect for life had been trampled, caring forgotten,
responsibility cast aside, the fact that you fought to survive—what
kind of miracle is this? . . . Now, Yiyi, on behalf of you lying there on
that sickbed and those lives buried in the ground, people are
refusing to give up on finding the truth. Truth cannot be buried.”[5]

A year after this incident, I applied for a job at the Economic
Observer. The paper had started in 2001 as one of a very small
handful of privately owned national newspapers. It hoped to become
a Chinese equivalent to the Financial Times, and over the years it
had indeed built a reputation for investigative journalism and
challenging the Party line. Most notably, in 2010, EO deputy editor
Zhang Hong took an unprecedented step in Chinese media history
when he organized thirteen other newspapers to run a joint editorial
calling for the government to abolish the hukou residence system.
For this action, the government subsequently saw that he was
“removed” from his job (though in reality he continued working
under another title).
EO hired me as one of just two foreigners on its staff, and I
quickly found the newspaper to be a breath of fresh air compared to
the state-owned papers I had come into contact with. The journalists
were young—mostly of the post-80s generation—fiercely intelligent,
and hardly constrained in their thinking by the Party line. There was
one major drawback they faced though. Their peers in state media
were relatively sheltered by their state-owned status; EO reporters
challenged authorities at their own risk.
As with any Chinese paper, self-censorship by reporters was
critical. In a few prominent areas, such as Tiananmen, Falun Gong,
and ethnic tensions, a clear line of demarcation told reporters where
they could not go, but on most topics the line was blurry and always
moving. Frequent directives from propaganda officials indicated
items not to discuss, but this list was by no means all-inclusive. The
resulting guessing game usually caused reporters to be overly
cautious, but sometimes it led them unintentionally into taboo
territory.
During my first month at the paper, two such transgressions
occurred. The first came when the worst rainstorm in fifty years hit
Bei​jing, causing catastrophic flooding that overwhelmed the city’s
unseen infrastructure (the inadequacy of which remains in stark
contrast to the glitzy showcase buildings thrown up for the

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Olympics). The local government announced an official death toll of
thirty-seven, then revised it to seventy-nine after heavy criticism.
But for reporters on the ground, the numbers still did not quite add
up.
Officials in a village popular with tourists on the city outskirts
claimed that no deaths had been recorded there. But the EO found
that locals were aware of three people who were swept away and
still missing. The paper printed the story, renewing public skepticism
about the overall death toll. Similar stories had frequently been
written after previous disasters without retribution. But this one
proved to be a major miscalculation.
After the story appeared, Bei​jing authorities seized copies from
newsstands and local officials paid a visit to the EO office. Though in
practice the paper was nationally circulated and headquartered in
Bei​jing, it was officially licensed only as a local paper headquartered
in Shandong. Such clerical matters are routinely ignored until they
become convenient tools for authorities. Citing this technical
violation, the Bei​jing government officials said that the paper had to
shut down and get out of town.
It turned out that the critical article had come at a very bad time,
because several high-ranking Bei​jing officials, including the city’s
mayor, were expecting promotions at the upcoming 18th Communist
Party Congress.
News of the shutdown was leaked to foreign media, and
eventually management negotiated a truce with officials to stay
open. As a precautionary measure, the “Economic Observer” sign on
the building was removed and replaced with one for the company’s
marketing arm, thereby suggesting that nothing was headquartered
there and that no laws were being flouted.

The entrance to Economic Observer’s headquarters after Bei​jing authorities

threatened to shut the paper down. The Economic Observer sign has been

195
replaced with characters for the paper’s advertising branch.
(Photo: Eric Fish)
But the paper soon angered another group of authorities when it
reported that the corruption-ridden Ministry of Railways would soon
be broken up and absorbed by separate entities. The roughly two
million people employed within the railway system became
concerned about their jobs, and the ministry was furious. EO was
threatened with closure once again and slapped with a fine. The
young reporter who had written the piece was “removed” and
stripped of her journalist accreditation (she kept working under a
pseudonym and was ultimately vindicated when the ministry was
broken up the following year).
The two incidents made reporters aware that it was a very
sensitive time. At the upcoming 18th Party Congress, most of the
Politburo would be overturned and power would be transferred to Xi
Jinping. An EO editor summoned all journalists for a meeting,
warning them to be very careful for the next few months. Until the
congress was over, the paper was to stay focused on economics.
Just in case any reporters had not gotten the message, they
received one more not-so-subtle warning. A few days before the
congress began, a few mysterious men in army fatigues entered the
building and conspicuously walked through each department.

Journalists throughout the country were feeling similar pressures.
Across town, Liu Zhiyi, the Southern Weekend intern who had gone
undercover at Foxconn, was also feeling the pinch. “The time around
the 18th Party Congress was a holiday for journalists,” he laughed.[6]
Liu had become a journalist by accident after poor scores on his
high school math exams prevented him from pursuing an
information technology career. But in retrospect, he feels that it was
a blessing in disguise. “When I went into [journalism], I felt very
happy,” he said. “You start feeling maybe there are problems you
can stop.”
By 2012, at age twenty-three, he was interning for Caixin, a
respected independent financial magazine. Although he was still
finishing his studies at Tsing​hua University, his Foxconn reports had
convinced editors that he was ready for the big time. He was sent to
cover stories that might put even veteran reporters on edge.
In Inner Mongolia, he reported that a mine dump with millions of
tons of metal waste powder was contaminating groundwater,
affecting three thousand farmers and potentially harboring a
radioactive threat. Local propaganda officials tracked him down
during his research, but only after he had obtained nearly all the
information he needed.

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 That did not mean he would be able to publish, though. Inner
Mongolia’s Party secretary at the time was up for promotion to the
Politburo at the upcoming 18th Party Congress. The story was
shelved for several months until after he had left. “The media
environment is just like a stock market,” Liu said. “Sometimes
better, sometimes worse, but the main character has never
changed.”
A few months later, Liu was intercepted during an investigation
of Shandong cancer villages. “That happens almost every time I
report,” Liu laughed. “You can only guess when and where.” Police
escorted him to the train station and got him a ticket back to Bei​jing,
but they stopped at the gate. Liu went inside, waited a bit, and then
walked right back out to continue reporting.
His whole trip to Shandong was a game of cat-and-mouse. Liu’s
phone was easy to track, and he had to use his ID card to check in at
every hotel. Inevitably, someone would come banging on his door.
“Eventually you feel tired and a little scared,” he said. “You need a
hard heart.”

In the days leading up to the 18th Party Congress, the chokehold
on media reporting apparently proved too much for some journalists.
In 2008, Shanghai-based reporter Jian Guanzhou of the Oriental
Morning Post had exposed the state-owned dairy company Sanlu’s
responsibility for tainted milk powder in one of China’s largest ever
food safety scandals. But by September 2012, he had had enough.
“I’ve been at the Oriental Morning Post for ten years, during which I
have poured the most precious years of my youth, my sorrow, my
dreams and feelings into the purest of ideals,” Jian wrote on Weibo.
“Now my ideal is dead, so I’ll get going. Take care, brothers!”[7]
Over the coming months, several other famous reporters would
take the same step—some forced out after provocative reporting,
others departing voluntarily after becoming frustrated by the moral
compromises their job entailed. In 2011, a study showed that over
40 percent of China’s investigative journalists wanted to change
careers.[8] Wang Keqin, the EO’s most prominent investigative
journalist, reflected on Weibo about the rapidly deteriorating media
environment. “It’s getting colder,” he said. “The winter is
approaching.”[9] He probably did not realize how right he was.
But as these veteran reporters were leaving the field, wide-eyed
young journalism school graduates were coming up to take their
place. In 2013 I met Shen Nianzu, a spunky twenty-three-year-old
Fujian native hired by EO straight out of college. Contrary to Liu
Zhiyi, she had known from the beginning that she wanted to be a

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journalist. “I never thought of doing anything else,” she told me.[10]
During her sophomore year of college, she pulled strings so she
could take the unusual step of starting a full-time internship in lieu of
her required classes. She started at Southern Weekend, the
Guangzhou-based paper known for its liberal bent. Shen worked for
free at its Bei​jing bureau and lived among the “rat tribe” in a
basement apartment. She described life there as “horrible” but
regarded the opportunity as “precious.” After doing another six-
month internship at EO, she joined the paper full-time and wrote
stories highlighting official privilege and corruption. “The
propaganda department calls often,” she laughed. “And it’s always
my fault. I always make trouble.”
Every few months, we would take on a fresh batch of Chinese
college students as interns in the English Department. When Shen
Nianzu described how she had gotten into journalism, she sounded a
lot like our interns at their first interviews. They came from some of
China’s best schools and were rabid social media followers,
unindoctrinated and full of idealism. When we asked why they
wanted to work at EO, they would inevitably mention Wang Keqin.
Wang, forty-eight years old, was one of China’s leading
investigative reporters. His most prominent achievements included
unearthing a Henan AIDS epidemic caused by unsanitary blood
donation schemes and exposing a major securities fraud racket run
by local mafia. He had butted heads with both “black society”
(gangs) and “red society” (officials), getting threatened with prison
and death at various times.[11] For the elite, he was a nuisance and a
threat. For those at the bottom, he was often the last hope.
Occasionally, downtrodden commoners from the provinces whose
grievances had been rebuffed by the government bureaucracy would
wander into EO, asking where they could find “Teacher Wang.”
For the aspiring reporters who had grown up glued to social
media and addicted to discovering the truth behind the Party line,
Wang represented an ideal to strive for. Sadly, I would have to give
several of them their first disillusioning revelation about Chinese
journalism.
After the Bei​jing flood story and a separate report on local media
censorship that had drawn the ire of propaganda officials, EO felt
under pressure. Wang’s investigative department, which had written
the stories, was stripped bare and eventually Wang himself was
pushed out. On his last day, he packed up two tons of case papers
from petitioners who had come to him with their stories. “The things
stacked here are misery, blood and tears,” he wrote on Weibo. “But
I’ve always seen them as treasures. They go with me wherever I go. I

198
can throw away my furniture, but these cannot be discarded!”[12]
In the following days, I had to inform intern applicants who had
yet to hear the news that their idol had been unceremoniously
kicked to the curb by the very same paper he had inspired them to
join. For several weeks, I could not help but feel embarrassed and
conflicted about working there. Several of the Chinese reporters felt
the same way. But it was hard to place too much blame on the
higher-ups. It was just another battle in the war that they were
constantly fighting with authorities. They had to carefully decide
when to attack and when to retreat so they could fight another day.
It was these kinds of moral compromises that could wear on a
journalist fast. For Shen Nianzu, the wide-eyed idealism she had
harbored about changing the country through journalism quickly
dampened. “Gradually, I feel I’m just a small person changing little
things—I can’t change the whole structure,” she told me. “I have no
hope that the ruling class will change.” She looked up at me and
laughed. “Why did you come from a democracy to such a nation?”
But politics was not the only source of stress. Surveys have
identified reporters as the least desirable job category for a marriage
partner in China.[13] The low pay, long and erratic hours, and
inherent instability of the job make getting by a constant struggle.
Not surprisingly, when opportunities to supplement income present
themselves, more than a few reporters indulge.
Usually these supplements came in the form of “transportation
fees” of a few hundred yuan when public-relations professionals
were seeking coverage of their companies’ events or product
launches. I learned from a higher editor that accepting such
payments was against EO policy, but most reporters seemed to view
it as a perfectly normal part of the job.
Things sometimes appeared to go a step further when articles
started resembling corporate advertisements. On occasion,
management would send a company-wide e-mail informing
employees that a certain journalist and his or her editor had been
fined for “unprofessional reports.” The fines could be as much as
1,000 yuan ($160), but the public humiliation was worse.
Accepting bribes in exchange for giving positive coverage or
withholding negative coverage was ubiquitous in China. One former
editor-in-chief of a popular Chinese magazine proclaimed in 2014
that China’s media had entered an “age of corruption.”[14] This
practice had even spawned a cottage industry of fake reporters who
blackmail company bosses, threatening to cover embarrassing
incidents and demanding payoffs. For real reporters, the allure of
bribes was constant. But turning them down and refusing to play by

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the rules of powerful corporate interests could get downright scary.
After EO published an unflattering article about a Chongqing
real-estate company, a group of burly thugs with shaved heads
showed up at the office looking for the reporter (who was tipped off
and escaped before they could find his desk). Likewise, a television
reporter I knew in Nanjing who did exposés on unscrupulous
businesses would routinely receive threats and was once even sent
an envelope containing a bullet. This reporter eventually gave up
journalism in favor of hosting a cheesy Japanese-style obstacle-
course TV show.
As with officialdom or any other Chinese profession vulnerable to
corruption, journalists frequently faced the dilemma of whether to do
what was righteous and extremely dangerous or swallow their pride
and accept a stack of cash. During Wang Keqin’s heyday in the early
2000s, making the righteous choice may have been a tad easier. In
those years, which some have charitably deemed a “golden age” of
investigative journalism in China, commercial watchdog papers like
EO were allowed to thrive and reporters became bolder.[15] But then
in 2003, the stability-minded Hu Jintao took over China’s presidency.
In the following year, new regulations on cross-provincial reporting
attempted to rein in the media’s growing annoyance of those in
power.[16]
Zhang Hong, my former boss at EO and the editor behind the
2010 joint hukou editorial, told me that this was what began a
gradual tightening of the press that would unfold for the next decade
and beyond. “Even three years ago [journalism] was regarded as a
good job,” Zhang told me in early 2014 after he had left EO for the
Hong Kong–based South China Morning Post. “You could still have
influence and respect, and the payment wasn’t bad.”[17]
Zhang commented that the crunch on traditional papers brought
about by the Internet was squeezing out jobs and lowering salaries
while tightening restrictions were creating a media brain drain.
“Journalism is just a job,” he said. “The overall environment is
becoming more materialistic and realistic. Passion isn’t the driving
force.”
I asked why he himself had gotten into the field. “Sometimes I
was idealistic,” he replied. “I wanted to change society for the better
and change the country for the next generation, but nothing
changes. You just get frustrated.”
I protested, reminding him of the waves he had created with the
2010 hukou joint editorial. “But what changed?” he asked, before
answering his own question. “Nothing changed, it made no
difference. People with dignity and passion get driven out of the

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newspaper business.”

In late 2012, the 18th Party Congress came and went without
incident, but any hopes that the media environment would relax
were dashed when Xi Jinping further tightened the already ironclad
grip on reporters. The following summer, he made his stance on the
issue clear. “We must adhere to the Marxist view of journalism,” he
said in a speech. “We must communicate positive energy. We have
to make sure the front of the Internet is firmly controlled by people
who are loyal to Marxism, loyal to the Party, and loyal to the
people.”[18]
The “Marxist view of journalism” has three basic tenets: support
Communist Party principles, criticize the “bourgeois concept of free
speech,” and maintain the correct “guidance of public opinion.”[19]
Soon after Xi’s speech, it was announced that the three hundred
thousand reporters working for state-owned media would be
required to undergo a two-day Marxist journalism refresher course
and pass a test. Propaganda Ministry officials would also be put in
charge of top-tier journalism schools to ensure implementation of the
required subject matter.[20] But as with all such top-down initiatives,
it was hard to tell how effective the program was at the local level.
When I studied journalism at Tsing​hua University, my Chinese
classmates usually laughed off my questions about the concept of
“Marxist journalism.” One professor suggested that it might more
accurately be called “nationalist journalism,” but that was becoming
a harder sell in an increasingly internationally oriented China.
The dean of the Tsing​hua journalism school at the time, Liu
Binjie, held a dual role as head of the General Administration of Press
and Publication—China’s chief censorship agency for print
publications. But like a growing number of journalism schools in the
country, Tsing​hua had also started hiring foreign professors who had
worked for Western media outlets. As a result, my Chinese
classmates would listen to a professor from the state propaganda
apparatus in one class and then study ethics with an American
Bloomberg News reporter in the next. Students would debate
questions like whether a journalist should be loyal to their country or
their readers first, and attitudes among Chinese and foreigners were
not so dissimilar.
The head of my journalism program, Shi Anbin, had taught for
years in the United States before coming to Tsing​hua, where he also
trained government spokesmen. He agreed with Zhang Hong’s
assessment that young journalists today lack the idealism of his
generation. “I would say most of them who choose journalism still

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have some ambition to change society,” he opined. “But if you
balance materialist and spiritual aspects, materialism wins out.”[21]
Indeed, when my Chinese classmates looked for work after
graduation, benefits trumped ideology. One student went from
interning at Bloomberg to working for People’s Daily. Another started
at the official government news agency Xinhua, only to move to
Caixin a few months later. Shi said this frequent pattern is one
reason why he aims to expose students to both Marxist journalism
and the Western philosophy of “professional” journalism. This way,
no matter where they ended up, young reporters could better push
things in a positive direction. “If they write something for People’s
Daily, they can also distill something from the New York Times,” he
said. “And those who work for Caixin will also have an idea of Marxist
journalism so they know where the bottom line is.”
Shi conceded that, with the drop in idealism and the Internet-
induced upheaval in the news industry, newspapers were struggling.
But he saw this as an opportunity to develop a new form of
investigative journalism. When I spoke with him in early 2014, he
was appealing to the Ministry of Education to require a course in
“netizen [i.e., Internet citizen] journalism” for all university students,
not just aspiring journalists. “I believe that in the future everyone will
be a journalist,” he said.
In many ways, that future had already arrived. After microblogs
widely drew attention to the 2011 Wenzhou train crash, a new era of
information dissemination that circumvented state censors was
ushered in, with Weibo leading the charge. Over the following year, a
series of officials fell after being exposed online—some by
professional journalists, but others by ordinary citizens. In one
especially damning incident, local Shaanxi officials gave a twenty-
two-year-old woman a forced abortion after she had failed to pay a
40,000 yuan ($6,385) fine for violating the one-child policy. Officials
then proceeded to place the dead seven-month-old fetus on the bed
beside the woman.[22] Family members snapped a picture and
posted it on Weibo, where it was forwarded some forty thousand
times among enraged netizens. The officials involved were later
fired, and the incident also exposed the widespread practice of
forced abortion, of which many Chinese were previously unaware. It
stirred a national debate about the one-child policy in which several
major newspapers participated.
But the social media event that would shake the Communist
Party harder than any other came at the beginning of 2013, when
Southern Weekend tried publishing a New Year’s editorial calling for
constitutionalism. The original version never appeared. Southern

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Weekend reporters alleged that, in a break from the norm of working
with editors on changes, Guangdong propaganda chief Tuo Zhan had
unilaterally altered the editorial, turning it from a biting social
commentary into an error-riddled puff piece glorifying the
Communist Party. For Southern Weekend reporters fed up with
increasingly overbearing censorship, it was the final straw. They
publicly demanded Tuo Zhan’s dismissal and threatened to go on
strike.
The reporters were not rejecting censorship in general or
demanding a free press. They just opposed particularly egregious
intrusions. But their modest appeal sparked much more ambitious
demands from public supporters.
Actress Yao Chen, who had 31 million Weibo followers, and actor
Chen Kun (with 27 million followers) chimed in with messages of
support for the paper, followed by dozens of other major public
figures. Across the country, hundreds of college students uploaded
pictures of themselves—most of them with their faces shown—
holding placards that read “Let’s go Southern Weekend!”[23] In an
open letter, eighteen students at Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen
University wrote, “It is because we have yielded that power has
become unbridled and wanton; it is because we have been silent
that the Constitution has become a rubber stamp. Our yielding and
our silence have not brought a return of our freedom and our
radiance. Quite the opposite, they have brought the untempered
intrusion and infiltration of rights by power.”[24]
Perhaps the most remarkable show of support was the hundreds
of young people who gathered outside Southern Weekend’s
Guangzhou offices to protest. Some wore Guy Fawkes masks and
signs demanding freedom of speech. One read, “If I don’t stand up
today, I won’t be able to stand up tomorrow.”[25]
As Guangdong authorities debated their response, protesters
were tacitly allowed to stay. But in an attempt at intimidation, police
walked around the demonstration taking pictures of participants.
When one officer lifted his camera to capture a young woman’s face,
she raised two fingers to her cheek in a “V for victory” sign.
As the events unfolded, I was shocked by the fearlessness of the
young protesters. It was not just another demonstration over
environmental issues or land requisitions. They had a lot to lose by
calling publicly for press freedom and very little tangible benefit to
gain. They still represented a very small sample of Chinese youth,
but they were a segment few people realized existed yet.
But in hindsight, the evolution of attitudes did not seem so
strange. When I had first arrived in China five years earlier, the

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young people with whom I spoke usually defended the country’s
censorship system, echoing the Party line with comments like “If the
truth were revealed, China would collapse” or “Poor people must
support the leaders if we’re to keep developing. They wouldn’t if the
media could criticize the leaders.” Since the outbreak of microblogs,
I was hearing such comments less often. One incident at a time,
China’s youth were gradually realizing that the country’s press and
speech restrictions did not just cover up abstract embarrassments.
They hid petty corruption, tainted food, avoidable accidents,
pollution, and unjust land grabs—injustices that could be prevented
in the future if reported.
But in the end, whatever inspiration the event yielded slowly
evaporated. Southern Weekend’s stand fizzled out in a negotiated
truce with officials. The protesters went home, and soon the editor
thought to have sparked the conflict with propaganda authorities
was replaced. In late 2013 the paper shocked many when it
inexplicably provided testimony that helped authorities to prosecute
activists accused of “disturbing public order” by organizing protests
of support.[26]
Still, the event’s resolution might be seen as an improvement
over the past. A decade earlier, in 2003, the Guangdong-based
Southern Metropolis Daily had embarrassed provincial officials with
reports on detention camps and SARS; two of its editors were
slapped with lengthy prison sentences on trumped-up charges. “In
the old days they’d just get rid of you completely, destroy you,”
Zhang Hong told me. “Now they just get someone else to do the
job.”

Throughout 2013, the Xi Jinping–led Communist Party continued
a media crackdown that extended online. That year, the Supreme
People’s Court also ruled that “spreading rumors” on the Internet
could result in up to three years in prison. On the surface, this ruling
appeared to address a legitimate problem, since destructive false
rumors did indeed run rampant on Weibo and other platforms. In one
case, a pharmaceutical company lost one billion yuan ($160 million)
in market value after a television actress with 26 million Weibo
followers retweeted a doctor’s false claims that the company’s
medicine had been proven toxic.[27] However, one of the first
“rumormongers” arrested under the law was a sixteen-year-old boy
in western China who questioned a police ruling that a local man had
jumped to his death.[28] Over the following months, influential
bloggers who spoke out against authorities were reined in through
account deletions and even, in some cases, arrests on unrelated

204
charges.[29] This ratcheting up of controls was accompanied by a raft
of new restrictions on traditional media. In 2014, China was ranked
175th out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index, just
behind Iran and Vietnam.[30]
But even amid this clampdown, China was on an irreversible
course of de facto democratization of permissible speech. Young
people coming of age on social media were growing intolerant of
official deception and less frightened of speaking up. The curtain had
been pulled back on the once-mighty monolith, exposing a deeply
insecure network of vulnerable bureaucrats. Though the journalism
sector was going through ups and downs (mostly downs), young
people continued to use social media to tug on the boundaries of
permissible speech, making it easier for those within the professional
media apparatus to push from the inside.
On its twelfth anniversary in April 2013, the Economic Observer
ran an editorial reflecting on the role of media in modern China. “In
an era where the Internet can penetrate every aspect of life, there
are more and more channels for gaining information,” it read. “But
the difference between a responsible media and simple
disseminators of information always lies in the fact that media must
have social responsibility and the courage to confront lies. Media
sees reporting facts as its fundamental mission. . . . Needless to say,
sometimes the media must also keep silent. Silence is a kind of
attitude. Just continuing to exist is often a difficult commitment to
make. But it is a valuable one, because as long as you are still here,
you will always have the possibility to speak out—even when it
means suffering for doing so.”[31]
The summer after the 2013 Southern Weekend protest, Liu Zhiyi
graduated from Tsing​hua and accepted his first full-time job at the
paper. I asked him how he felt about embarking on a career in such a
restrictive and uncertain environment. “Sooner or later the system
will be changed,” he said. “But I think it’s later, not sooner.”
He paused and cracked a smile. “But I don’t even look for the
destination, I just enjoy the trip.”
1. China Digital Times. “Directives from the Ministry of Truth:
Wenzhou High-Speed Train Crash.” Last modified July 25, 2011.
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2011/07/directives-from-the-ministry-of-
truth-wenzhou-high-speed-train-crash/.
2. Osnos, Evan. “Boss Rail.” The New Yorker, October 22, 2012.
Accessed October 17, 2014.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/22/boss-rail.
3. Branigan, Tania. “Chinese Anger over Alleged Cover-Up of High-
Speed Rail Crash.” The Guardian, July 25, 2011. Accessed May 29,

205
2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/25/chinese-rail-
crash-cover-up-claims.
4. “Ministry of Railways Faces Sharp Questions at Press Conference.”
CCTV News, July 26, 2011. Accessed October 23, 2014.
http://english.cntv.cn/program/china24/20110726/103573.shtml.
5. “” [Letter to Yiyi—When You’ve Grown Up]. Economic
Observer, July 30, 2011. Accessed May 29, 2014.
http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/2011/0801/207710.shtml.
6. Liu, Zhiyi. Interview by author, Bei​jing, June 2013.
7. Ping, He, and Wei Ling. “Milk Scandal Reporter Quits.” Radio Free
Asia, September 5, 2012. Accessed May 29, 2014.
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/melamine-
09052012122927.html.
8. Zhang, Zhian, and Fei Shen. “” [Chinese Investigative Reporter
Industry Ecosystem Report]. Modern Communication no. 183 (2011):
51–73.
9. Zhang, Yueran. “Winter for Chinese Media: Why So Many
Respected Journalists Are Leaving the Field.” Tea Leaf Nation,
September 11, 2012. Accessed May 29, 2014.
http://www.tealeafnation.com/2012/09/winter-for-chinese-media-why-
so-many-respected-journalists-are-leaving-the-field/.
10. Shen, Nianzu. Interview by author, Bei​jing, August 2013.
11. Branigan, Tania. “Wang Keqin and China’s Revolution in
Investigative Journalism.” The Guardian, May 23, 2010. Accessed
May 29, 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/23/wang-keqin-china-
investigative-journalism.
12. Bandurski, David. “Veteran Muckraker Forced to Leave Paper.”
China Media Project, March 1, 2013. Accessed May 29, 2014.
http://cmp.hku.hk/2013/03/01/31597/.
13. Baihe and the Committee of Wedding Service Industries China
Association of Social Workers. “2012 ” [2012 Chinese Love and
Marriage Report]. 2013.
14. Zhu, Xuedong. “China’s Corrupt Media.” China Media Project.
Last modified September 19, 2014.
http://cmp.hku.hk/2014/09/19/36099/.
15. Branigan, “Wang Keqin and China’s Revolution in Investigative
Journalism.”
16. Branigan, “Wang Keqin and China’s Revolution in Investigative
Journalism.”
17. Zhang, Hong. Interview by author, Bei​jing, January 2014.
18. Denyer, Simon. “Chinese Journalists Face Tighter Censorship,
Marxist Retraining.” Washington Post, January 10, 2014. Accessed
October 23, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chinese-

206
journalists-face-tighter-censorship-marxist-re-
training/2014/01/10/6cd43f62-6893-11e3-8b5b-
a77187b716a3_story.html.
19. China Media Project. “The Marxist View of Journalism” . July 5,
2007. Accessed May 29, 2014. http://cmp.hku.hk/2007/07/05/424/.
20. Denyer, “Chinese Journalists Face Tighter Censorship.”
21. Shi, Anbin. Interview by author, Bei​jing, January 2014.
22. Beech, Hannah. “China: Forced-Abortion Victim Promised
$11,200, but Family Fears for Life.” Time, July 13, 2012. Accessed
October 23, 2014. http://world.time.com/2012/07/13/china-forced-
abortion-victim-awarded-11200-fears-for-life/.
23. Lu, Rachel. “Online and Off, Social Media Users Go to War for
Freedom of Press in China.” Tea Leaf Nation, January 7, 2013.
http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/01/online-and-off-social-media-
users-go-to-war-for-freedom-of-press-in-china/?
utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Tealeaf
24. Bandurski, David. “Students Speak Out against Censorship.”
China Media Project, January 6, 2013. Accessed May 29, 2014.
http://cmp.hku.hk/2013/01/06/30375/.
25. Gao, Helen. “A Press Renaissance? The Legacy of China’s
‘Southern Weekend.’” The Atlantic, January 11, 2013. Accessed May
29, 2014.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/a-press-
renaissance-the-legacy-of-chinas-southern-weekend/267081/.
26. Lam, Oiwan. “China’s Southern Media Group Turns Back on Anti-
Censorship Supporters.” Global Voices, December 29, 2013.
Accessed May 29, 2014.
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2013/12/29/chinas-southern-weekend-
newspaper-turns-back-on-anti-censorship-supporters/.
27. Li, Amy. “Pharmaceutical Company Loses 1b Yuan after 140-word
Weibo Message.” South China Morning Post, February 1, 2013.
Accessed May 29, 2014.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1140943/pharmaceutical-
company-loses-1b-yuan-after-140-word-weibo-message.
28. Jacobs, Andrew. “China’s Crackdown Prompts Outrage over Boy’s
Arrest.” New York Times, September 23, 2013. Accessed October 24,
2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/world/asia/crackdown-on-
dissent-in-china-meets-online-backlash-after-boys-arrest.html.
29. Buckley, Chris. “Crackdown on Bloggers Is Mounted by China.”
New York Times, September 10, 2013. Accessed October 24, 2014.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/world/asia/china-cracks-down-
on-online-opinion-makers.html?pagewanted=all.
30. Reporters Without Borders. “World Press Freedom Index 2014.”
2014. http://rsf.org/index2014/en-index2014.php.

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31. “” [Media’s Responsibility in This Era]. Economic Observer,
April 12, 2013. Accessed May 29, 2014.
http://www.eeo.com.cn/2013/0412/242483.shtml.

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 Chapter 15
Generations
Every Friday evening, at the main square of Beijing’s Renmin
University, hundreds of Chinese urbanites show up for English
Corner.
Between tall trees and lush bushes that enclose the stone grounds,
students, teachers, professionals, dissidents, nationalists, foreigners,
evangelists, and lonely singles all come together. A desire to practice
English ostensibly unites them, but other motives abound.
The weekly gathering is perhaps the biggest of its kind in the
capital, and some have dubbed it an unofficial “free speech zone”
because of the wealth of topics discussed.[1] When I arrive and a
group congregates around me, the first question is inevitably “Where
are you from?” followed immediately by “What do you think of
China?”
“America” and “It’s complicated,” I reply. A lengthy political
discussion typically ensues.
In the late 1980s, across town, college students from around the
city would assemble on another patch of land sheltered by brush. On
a small hill in Purple Bamboo Park, hundreds gathered each Sunday
morning, primarily to improve their English skills. But the discussions
invariably turned to politics, a subject more comfortably broached in
a foreign language.
Around that time, cities across the country had similar informal
gatherings—in parks, classrooms, and public squares—where youth
discussed the ills that had taken hold in their once-great country.
They were eagerly picking up where their grandparents and great-
grandparents had left off seven decades earlier, when China was
emerging from imperial rule. Back then, youth lamented that an
antiquated culture and a lack of democratic tools were keeping the
country weak. The “New Culture Movement” culminated with a
nationalistic uprising on May 4, 1919, as students lashed out at what
they considered weak and corrupted leaders who had stood by idly
as foreign powers handed Chinese territory to Japan in a post–World
War I treaty.
The movement would eventually break into sparring factions—
including Marxists who would go on to found the Communist Party—
before sputtering out completely. When the CCP eventually came to
power, it monopolized the legacy of May 4th and, for a generation,
silenced all political ideas other than its own.
When Mao’s iron-fisted rule ended after three decades, the
nation agreed that change was long overdue. The message of
Reform and Opening Up was touted, but with no clear roadmap as to

209
how far change would extend. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s,
many of the ideas set aside after the New Culture Movement were
picked up again and calls for reform grew louder, spilling out into the
streets on many occasions. It was an era of openness and discussion
that the country had not seen for more than half a century. But these
discussions did not always pan out as they have been popularly
romanticized.

Some of the first stirrings of the 1989 Tian​anmen movement
began four years earlier in, of all places, Japan. It was a period when
the island nation was flooding China with aid loans and investment,
partly as a means to access the alluring Chinese market and its
natural resources. It was a time when China was hardly in a position
to reciprocate and capitalize on the Japanese market. Amid soaring
inflation, many Chinese resented this uneven economic exchange
and felt it was the result of their government officials selling out the
country for their own benefit.[2]
The final straw then came in August 1985 when Japanese Prime
Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone visited a shrine for war martyrs that
included some convicted of war crimes against China. Young Chinese
cried foul. For years there had been isolated pockets of protest
against restrictive university policies and conditions like poor food,
overcrowded dormitories, and nighttime power cutoffs.[3] But with
this incident, students were emboldened to take on bigger issues.
Signs were put up at universities railing against Japan and the
domestic leaders cozying up to it. One poster read “Commemorate
the [Chinese] martyrs” and “Overthrow the corrupt cadres.”[4]
On the September 18 anniversary of Japan’s invasion of
Manchuria, against the orders of school officials, hundreds of college
students marched to Tian​anmen Square to protest.[5] Over the next
several months, more student protests erupted that were ostensibly
aimed at Japan, though more and more voices critical of the Chinese
government and official privilege were joining in.[6] Another
demonstration was slated for Tian​anmen Square in December of
1985 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1935 December 9th
Movement, where thousands of Chinese students had protested the
Kuomintang government for its failure to resist Japanese aggression
and its unwillingness to secure freedom of speech, press, and
assembly. This time around, however, the students never made it to
the square. Authorities succeeded in stopping them, but that success
was fleeting.[7]
Over the next two years, protests continued at universities
across the country that increasingly conflated antiforeign slogans

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with those against local corruption and authoritarianism. Gradually,
they tilted almost completely toward political reform at home.[8] The
protests spread to over 150 campuses across China (sometimes
spilling back into Tian​anmen Square and around local government
bureaus) with some attracting tens of thousands of participants.[9] In
1987, Communist Party Chairman Hu Yaobang was pushed out of his
position for taking a tolerant stance on the protests—a move that
would come back to haunt the Communist Party.
In December 1988, nationalism again led to cries for democratic
reform. That month in Nanjing, a brawl broke out after African
students were prevented from bringing Chinese women through the
gates of their university to attend a dance. In previous years, several
large-scale racially motivated brawls had broken out at universities
around China, often due to relations between African men and
Chinese women.[10] And going back nearly a decade, Chinese
students had frequently expressed resentment over what they saw
as special treatment being bestowed upon foreign students in the
form of better food and accommodations.[11]
In the immediate aftermath of the Nanjing incident, false rumors
spread that Chinese women had been kidnapped, a Chinese security
guard had been killed, and that officials were shielding the African
murderers.[12] It implied an infuriating indication of China’s
weakness.
The story was not true, but the issues it represented struck a
nerve for the students who were becoming increasingly aware of the
corruption and privilege around them. They wanted to stand up and
defend their country’s dignity, but once again (as they saw it) they
were thwarted by bought-off officials and an unjust legal system.
Students took to the streets of Nanjing by the thousand,
besieging the foreign student dormitory and marching toward a
railway station where Africans were thought to be headed, all while
intermittently singing the Chinese national anthem. The protests
were mostly directed at the alleged African perpetrators, with
slogans like “Down with the black devils.”[13] But their attention soon
encompassed those thought to have shielded the foreigners. Slogans
like “Protect human rights” slid into the chants, as did calls for
political and legal reform.[14] The news spread to other cities, where
local students joined what had started as a nationalistic anti-African
protest.[15] Then, with the death of the popular reformist leader Hu
Yaobang four months later, the volume of calls for change was
cranked up. Years of “patriotic” protests had laid the foundation for
the largest one of all in 1989.

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 The Tian​anmen movement tends to be remembered as an anti-
Communist rebellion aimed at installing electoral democracy. But of
course, the reality was much more complex.
In China, democracy is a more abstract concept. It encompasses
the will of the people, the rule of law, public accountability of
leaders, and basic freedoms, but not necessarily direct national
elections or a tripartite separation of powers. Most of the Tian​anmen
protesters were calling simply for substantive reform within the
existing system. They wanted an overhaul, not an overthrow.
The Tian​anmen protest itself was incoherent. There was no clear
list of grievances. Many of the demands were contradictory. For the
average participant, names of so-called student leaders like Chai
Ling and Wu’er Kaixi meant very little, or nothing at all. These
leaders had their own power struggles and quickly broke into
factions, often adopting the same elitist and authoritarian tendencies
as those they were railing against in the government.[16] Whatever
control they had over the movement was confined to very small
pockets of it. There were too many divergent demands for anyone to
exert any meaningful leadership.
The movement spontaneously galvanized multiple segments of
Chinese society, some of which were not otherwise politically active.
Students complained of poor university conditions and overbearing
restrictions on their personal lives. Workers felt they were not getting
their share of the spoils from economic growth. Journalists wanted
more press freedom.
At the same time though, the various groups shared several
common concerns: rising prices, the difficulty of eking out a living,
an unfair employment landscape, endemic nepotism, and official
corruption. Democratic tools like transparency, the rule of law, and
media freedom were viewed as ways of addressing these problems.
Students overwhelmingly agreed with these vaguely defined ideas in
principle, and they had been primed by the smaller protests that had
taken shape in previous years. When they saw a major social
movement brewing around them, the excitement pulled throngs of
people into the streets who cared very little about politics. For a few
weeks, a patchwork of ideas and desires could be aired openly and,
it seemed, safely.
But the euphoria was short-lived. The subsequent crackdown
halted the era of openness in its tracks, and once again a movement
that had begun as a unified celebration of liberal ideas descended
into factionalism, with the Communist Party emerging as the big
winner. Hardliners used Tian​anmen to justify tighter control and
purge their liberal opponents within the Party.
But even though the liberal ideas took a beating, they were not

212
dead. They just retreated back to their niches. As Beijing remained
under martial law, with PLA troops swarming the city and rounding
up “counterrevolutionaries,” college students returned to Purple
Bamboo Park. One month after the suppression, a Chicago Tribune
reporter visited and was immediately inundated with questions.
“Does your country allow political demonstrations?” “Do soldiers use
bullets on people in your home?” “What do you think about our
country now?” “How can I get a visa from your embassy?” One
young man who had studied in the United States told the reporter
that they were down, but not out. “It’s all we have now, this corner,”
he said. “One day they will take it away, but there will always be
more corners, more talk to keep the fire burning.”[17]
He was right on all counts. That October, police officially banned
people from gathering in the space. But even though many of their
classmates had been mowed down by machine guns or thrown in
prison in the preceding months, students remained defiant. They
continued meeting by the dozen, brushing off plainclothes police
who tried to shoo them away.[18]
Eventually, though, Beijing’s biggest English Corner had to
move. It carried on at Renmin University where, miraculously, it has
remained ever since.[19]

Plainclothes police are still known to circulate throughout the
Renmin square and listen in on conversations, but for the most part
people can say what they want. Each time I went, I was impressed
by the young people’s knowledge of their country and mine. One
high school student recited passages from the American Declaration
of Independence. Another talked in depth about the palace intrigue
behind the Bo Xilai scandal that saw one of China’s twenty-five most
powerful leaders purged in 2012.
On one occasion, I spoke with half a dozen college students who
expressed their admiration of the US electoral process. “But I think
China would implode if we tried that,” one young man said with a
smirk. “And actually, if we asked for it, we’d be shot. It’s just
something we can dream about.”
“Of course you think that,” a sixty-something man huffed from
outside the circle. Then he turned to me, with a flippant finger aimed
at the students. “Their whole generation is like that—brainwashed
and useless.” To everyone’s amusement, the old man, who professed
having been the victim of unspecified “political troubles” in earlier
years, went on haranguing the “useless” youth.
The situation felt like a real-time editorial cartoon of prevailing
attitudes both within and outside China. Domestically, China’s

213
millennials are viewed as brain-dead moochers, unappreciative of
the hardship that earlier generations endured. Abroad, the contrast
is even starker. The Tian​anmen generation is perceived as brave,
idealistic, rebellious, and willing to lay down their lives for
democracy. The post-Tian​anmen generation, however, is made up of
brainwashed materialists, unwilling to fight for anything aside from a
BMW or Louis Vuitton bag.
With all the social change that has transpired since Tian​anmen,
it is tempting to compare today’s youth unfavorably to those of the
1980s. In the days leading up to the Tian​anmen crackdown’s twenty-
fifth anniversary in spring 2014, many foreign journalists in Beijing
took this approach by reporting students who expressed either
ignorance or ambivalence toward the incident. Many of the reports,
which usually failed to account for how the presence of a foreign
reporter might have influenced responses on the sensitive topic,
tended to portray naïve youths who had been manipulated into
complacent views.
But when I broached the topic of Tian​anmen with young people
with whom I had already spent time building rapport, I often found
fairly well-informed and nuanced opinions. “I really feel sorry for
those students,” one twenty-eight-year-old man at Renmin University
told me. “But politically speaking, maybe it was necessary.” Another
post-80s man agreed. “Things look different once it becomes
history,” he said. “[Tian​anmen] looks bad, but maybe there were
some good things. Chinese really want stability above all else.”
The grand bargain of authoritarian capitalism that emerged after
Tian​anmen has served most of the country very well. The
subsequent twenty-five years was a period of stability and growth
that China had not experienced in centuries. In some cases, young
Chinese whom I have encountered have even aggressively defended
what the government did at Tian​anmen, given how uncompromising
and factionalized the protestors were—though these people usually
do not understand how unnecessarily violent and indiscriminate the
massacre was. More often though, they say it is just not worth
dredging up the past if it might stir things up in the present. Bringing
up the memories of Tian​anmen could only hurt them personally and
threaten the grand bargain nationally, so it is pointless to do so. It is
better to just enjoy the gains and tolerate the Party that has so far
proven it can provide stability. It may not be a great government, but
it is preferable to an unknown and potentially chaotic alternative.
This attitude and the promise of China’s return to greatness
carried the country through the 1990s and 2000s. The Communist
Party successfully suppressed any group that could potentially
replace it, while at the same time convincing the populace that their

214
choice was simple: the current path of stable growth or chaos. But
now, the political environment is gradually regressing and the allure
of economic growth is being dwarfed by associated social and
environmental problems. The Communist Party’s ability to provide
“stability” becomes more questionable by the day, and the concerns
of youth are growing remarkably similar to those voiced at Tian​‐
anmen.

In September 2012 I headed to the Japanese embassy in Beijing,
where reports had said that thousands of Chinese had gathered to
protest the intensifying Diaoyu Islands dispute. When I arrived, packs
were marching in circles with banners while taking turns throwing
bottles, eggs, and rocks at the embassy. At the same time, images of
vandalized Japanese cars and destroyed shops were emerging from
around the country. Along with the photos of thousands congregated
at major protest sites, they gave the impression that China was
rabidly jingoistic. The government’s “Patriotic Education,” aimed at
whipping up popular support on the back of anti-Japanese
nationalism, had worked all too well.
But by attending a protest personally I also saw a slightly
different picture. The motivation of a few hundred people decked out
in patriotic garb was not in doubt; their loud shouts and intense
glares at the embassy showed that they meant business. But even
their anger was not all directed at Japan. Some began chanting
“Down with Chinese traitors!” exhorting the corrupt government to
develop a backbone and defend China. They were echoing slogans
from the 1919 May 4th movement, the 1935 December 9th
Movement, the 1985 anti-Japan protests, as well as the anti-African
protests of 1988.
Meanwhile, the majority of the reported “thousands of
protesters” stood on the periphery, their crossed arms and amused
chuckles at chants like “Little Japan, fuck your mother” betraying a
more passive role in the activities. I asked a twenty-six-year-old man
on the sidelines why he had come. “I think it’s cool,” he replied with
a grin.
More than a year later, a twenty-nine-year-old man on a train
offered a similar recollection of why he attended the demonstrations.
“I thought I might never get the chance to see a protest again,” he
said. “I thought it would be interesting.”
He explained that, naturally, he sided with China on the Diaoyu
Islands dispute and agreed in principle with standing up to Japan’s
actions, “but to be honest, I don’t really have any strong feeling
about Japan.”
I had heard similar accounts from a few Chinese friends in the

215
weeks after the protests. Their anger at Japan’s actions and their
general disdain for its historical transgressions were real. But that
was not what drew them to “protest.” For them, it was more about
the novelty, unity with peers, and a sense of patriotic duty. The
demonstrations were something they had never seen and might not
see again. It appeared patriotic, unifying, and politically safe to join
in, so they did. But that does not mean they were necessarily
enamored of nationalism, as many assumed. A survey conducted in
five major cities the following spring found that those who thought
military force should be on the table as an option to deal with Japan
were in the minority (41 percent); a majority advocated compromise
(57 percent) or United Nations arbitration (62 percent). Even more
surprisingly, it found that people among China’s post-90s generation
were less likely than older generations to advocate sending in troops
in territorial disputes, casting doubt on the idea that the post-Tian​‐
anmen youth have been made more nationalistic than those of 1989.
[20]
As tensions with Japan were heating up in the autumn of 2012,
someone posted an online poll on Weibo asking, “If your child were
born on the Diaoyu Islands, what nationality would you pick for
him/her: Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or the mainland?”
The poll was unscientific and its sample was disproportionally
composed of the young middle-class urbanites who most heavily
frequent Weibo, but the results were telling nonetheless. In the nine
hours during which the post was up before censors took it down,
Taiwan had drawn the most votes with 40 percent. Hong Kong and
Japan followed, leaving mainland China in last place with just 15
percent. One user wrote, “Sigh. I picked Taiwan, but in fact I love this
country. Just that I feel it doesn’t love me.”[21]
Post-80s Chinese journalist Helen Gao reflected on the survey
results: “The same Chinese nationalism that drives citizens to stand
up for their native land when outside forces challenge it could also
sharpen their pain when they observe the depressingly wide gap
between China as it is and China as they wish it could be.”[22]
In the 1995 documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace, several of
the Tian​anmen protest leaders looked back on the grievances that
had led to their involvement. “Hu Yaobang was an incorruptible
official,” said worker Han Dongfang, contrasting him with other
leaders. “He didn’t have bank accounts overseas. His children did
not hold high positions because he was the head of the Communist
Party.” Feng Congde, one of the student leaders, offered a different
complaint: “No matter how hard you worked you couldn’t get
anywhere.”[23]
In talking with scores of young Chinese over the past several

216
years, I have heard these same statements repeated ad nauseum in
various forms. Official privilege is universally recognized, as is the
growing gap between the haves and have-nots. In the summer of
2014, Peking University announced results of a study that drove
home just how much wealth had accumulated among the elite. It
found that the richest 1 percent of Chinese households controlled a
full one-third of the nation’s wealth.[24] An earlier survey asked
Chinese what they felt were “very big problems.” The top three
answers were rising prices, corrupt officials, and the rich–poor gap.
[25]
Chinese do not need the media to inform them about corruption.
Evidence of it is everywhere—in their companies, their schools, their
hospitals, and even the air they breathe. One 2014 survey found
that among forty-four countries, Chinese said more than anyone else
that they feel it is necessary to pay bribes to get ahead in life.[26]
The economic growth that pacified the Tian​anmen generation is
growing less impressive for the post-Tian​anmen millennials who treat
economic security as a given. More of them are demanding the right
to uncensored information, a clean environment, and the freedom to
speak up when wronged. To their annoyance, the government is
instituting these rights too slowly, and even rolling them back in
many cases.
As we have seen, this annoyance manifested itself in major
public protest in 2013, for the first time since Tian​anmen, when
hundreds showed up at Southern Weekend’s office calling for press
freedom. Their action seriously challenged prevailing assumptions
that this generation was not willing to stick its neck out for lofty
ideals.
Later, some touched on an even more sensitive subject. In June
2014, civil-rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang was arrested with several
others while attending a private memorial for the Tian​anmen
crackdown’s twenty-fifth anniversary. In response, a dozen students
uploaded pictures of themselves to Weibo, holding a sign with Pu’s
likeness. “We are the post-90s, you say we are immature, we are
rebellious, we are wild. But we are definitely not brain-dead!” it said.
“We are the post-90s, in fact we are passionate, we are rising, we
are ready to take on responsibility. Therefore we support Pu
Zhiqiang!”[27]
Shortly after these pictures started circulating online, I got in
touch with Liao Minyue, the twenty-one-year-old design student who
had organized the campaign. To her surprise, many young students
were willing to show their faces in support of the cause, and even
more e-mailed to express their quiet support.
In her younger days, Liao had been a star student and a leader

217
in the Communist Party Youth League, but later she publicly
jettisoned all affiliation with the CCP. Paradoxically, her father worked
in the Public Security Bureau and her mother, Liu Ping, was a
member of the New Citizen’s Movement, an activist group that
advocated wealth disclosure for government officials (the two had
long since divorced). Before the Pu Zhiqiang online campaign, Liao
had been outspoken on issues like asset disclosure and
constitutionalism. Her activities had gotten her “invited to tea” with
authorities, and two companies where she interned had warned her
that she would be fired unless she ceased her activism. “At the
beginning, I was scared but later the fear evaporated because I know
what I do is just,” she told me. “China’s current law system clearly
isn’t independent. Police, lawmakers, and courts belong to one
family. I don’t want my parents living in a social system without law,
and I don’t certainly don’t want the same situation to remain for my
generation and even my kids’ generation.”[28]
She explained that she was an anomaly among her peers for her
outspokenness, but she recognized more and more post-90s youth
developing a consciousness for injustice. “One improvement over the
past is that young people are willing to talk about topics that they
wouldn’t have dared breach years earlier,” she said, citing discussion
of the Tian​anmen Square crackdown as an example. “Post-90s have
a much stronger desire to learn and innovate, and they’re willing to
bypass the constrained education to learn the real history. So I think
there is great hope for post-90s to promote democracy and
constitutionalism.”

Today, many people believe that modern Chinese youths’
supposedly materialistic and nationalistic attitudes preclude an
event like Tian​anmen from happening again. But for all their
differences, the Tian​anmen and post-Tian​anmen generations have a
lot more in common than is commonly recognized.
Several student protests took place in the 1980s (and even the
1970s), but all were broken up before they could metastasize into
anything larger. Arguably, one of the most significant factors that set
1989 apart was a prolonged rift between liberals and hardliners at
the top of the Communist Party leadership. That rift allowed the
demonstrations to go on relatively undisturbed and permitted the
media to advertise them to the rest of the country, propelling them
to the point where it seemed safe and cool to join. The core of vocal
activists was joined by droves of citizens who, like many of the 2012
anti-Japan protesters, agreed with the cause in principle and
considered themselves patriotic but did not see themselves as
especially political or emotionally invested in the action.

218
 Between the anti-Japan protests, the environmental
demonstrations, and the outpouring of support for Southern
Weekend in recent years, it is not hard to see the same potential in
Chinese youth today. The key difference is that the Communist Party
has invested heavily in ensuring that this potential is never again
leveraged.
Days after I spoke with Liao Minyue, her mother was sentenced
to six and a half years in prison on trumped-up charges for her
activism with the New Citizen’s Movement. Liao herself was
summoned by authorities and forced to forfeit her passport. Having
learned from Tian​anmen and the collapse of the Soviet bloc several
months later, the Party now presents a united front in public and
aggressively stomps out any slight spark that could grow into
opposition.
But perhaps an equally compelling factor keeping young Chinese
from taking to the streets en masse is that, in spite of the constant
crackdowns on a relatively small pool of dissidents, most people feel
freer than ever before. Zhang Lijia, a Beijing-based writer who
organized a worker protest in Nanjing during the Tian​anmen
movement, compared her generation to post-90s youth. “We were in
a small cage,” she told me. “There’s still a cage today, but for many
people it’s gotten so big that they often don’t even notice it.”[29]
In 2011 China’s most famous post-80s blogger, Han Han,
similarly wrote a post entitled “Speaking of Revolution” that summed
up how people of his generation feel. “If you ask the average man or
woman in the street if they are free, they generally feel that they
are,” he wrote. “And if you ask them whether they need justice, the
prevailing view is that so long as they personally don’t suffer
injustice, that’s sufficient. It’s not everyone who regularly
experiences unfair treatment, so they won’t identify with efforts to
seek justice and freedom for others. In China it’s very hard to
formulate a demand that has collective appeal. So it’s not a question
of whether a revolution is needed or not, it’s a question of whether it
can possibly happen. My view is: it’s neither possible nor necessary.
But if you ask me whether China needs more substantial reform, my
answer is: absolutely.”[30]
Rather than a single massive demonstration calling on the
government to reform, China’s millennials will more likely push and
pull on the system from ten thousand directions, very gradually—one
minor conflict and issue at a time. On the whole, most twenty-
something Chinese youth are neither the liberal revolutionaries that
many want them to be nor the sheep that many imagine them to be.
Still, it would be foolish to rule anything out in China. After Xi

219
Jinping took power in 2012, he began a ruthless crackdown on
corruption that reached officials previously thought to be
untouchable, and it had effects beyond what anybody in the West
expected. It was massively popular with the public, leading to a
prolonged honeymoon period for Xi. Public cynicism cooled and the
protest movements that appeared to have been building up under
Hu Jintao ebbed.
But just as instrumental in achieving these effects may have
been Xi’s other, less publicized, campaign. While he was cracking
down on corruption, he also began a far-reaching crackdown on
dissent and a culling of religious, social, and environmental activities
that had been tacitly tolerated in prior years. It sent a chill through
the circles of would-be activists.
Xi’s anticorruption campaign, while unprecedented in its scope,
differed little from all those that had preceded it. It relied not on
grassroots reporting of corruption or independent courts enforcing
the rule of law, but on selective purges. It remains to be seen
whether the drive can continue to support Xi’s popularity and pay
dividends to the Communist Party’s legitimacy without introducing
more basic political reforms. Over the coming years, China’s list of
demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental woes are set to
trend upward, and it seems unlikely that the public’s tolerance and
inhibitions will move any direction but downward. If rising grievances
and shrinking patience among an increasingly affluent and vocal
populace were to intersect with some sort of sudden catalyst that
cast doubt on the CCP’s ability to lead, it is not hard to imagine
another youth-led political movement taking shape.
Any predictions about how China’s hundreds of millions of
millennials will shape their country are risky, but one thing is almost
certain: like youth around the world, they will not sit back idly and
accept the status quo inherited from their parents.

At the main stadium of Tsinghua University on a humid
September afternoon, thousands of new freshmen approach in army
fatigues. It is the end of their three weeks of Junxun military training.
PLA marching music blares over the speakers as the students
pour through the gates in companies of 170. At the front, the tallest
boy hoists up a red flag with his classmates following behind, eyes
locked forward as they clumsily try to keep their steps in line.
Several of the shortest girls in the back scamper to keep up,
breaking the perfect synchronization.
Crowds of parents and curious locals line the bleachers and peek
through the stadium’s fence as an announcer shouts, “Make sure to
practice the good thoughts, good behavior, and good habits you

220
learned during Junxun in your future study and life!”
Finally, the last platoon settles into standing formation. The
announcer says that military training is “one of the holiest tasks
given by the People’s Republic of China.” After a few more
exhortations about the importance of national defense and character
building through Junxun, the performances begin. At one point,
sounds of machine-gun fire and cannons are blasted from the
speakers as plumes of smoke are released. Students fall to the
ground and crawl forward, simulating the fog of war.
Finally, the atmosphere lightens and students take a seat. A
series of university officials and military officers give speeches, often
cracking jokes to the smiling students. “These twenty days of
training have been unforgettable,” says one of the PLA instructors.
“If we did anything wrong, please forgive us. Now I would like to use
a salute to say good-bye to the teachers and students, and may our
friendship last forever!”
With that, the PLA instructors all stand and march off to the
buses waiting to return them to base. Many of the girls (and several
of the guys) begin crying as they watch their officers depart.
As the festivities were winding down, I approached a group of
girls to ask how they view their generation relative to the common
stereotypes. Eighteen-year-old Zhang Xiaonan from Heilongjiang
responded with an almost defensive tone. “People discriminate
against us and say we’re spoiled only children,” she said. “In fact,
the post-90s are very independent and have many traditional spirits.
Many things are changing, so we’re also changing.”[31]
When I suggested that foreigners may regard the endless drills
and patriotism lessons in Junxun as part of a broader power play
aimed at keeping their generation in line, eighteen-year-old Li Hao
from Hebei scoffed. “That’s a kind of discrimination. There are
differences between countries. They see the same thing, but their
impression is opposite.”[32]
As if to prove her point, the closing ceremony drew to a close
with school officials leading the students in one last revolutionary
song. In contemporary China, who the song is directed against and
who best champions its ideals remain ambiguous. Nevertheless, the
girls smiled and sang along:
Unity is strength.
It’s harder than iron,
Stronger than steel.
Toward the fascists open fire.
Death to all nondemocratic systems!
Toward the sun.
Toward freedom.
Toward a new China.

221
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http://thefaceofchina.com/2014/01/09/english-corner-
china%E2%80%99s-free-speech-zone/.
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352_1_student-protest.
3. Mann, “Student Protests Challenge Deng’s Policies.”
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5. Weiss, Powerful Patriots, 111.
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and the Chinese Student Protests. Indianapolis, IN: Universities Field
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9. Schell, Orville. Discos and Democracy: China in the Throes of
Reform. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988, 213; Wasserstrom, Jeffrey.
“Student Protests in Fin-de-Siècle China.” New Left Review 237
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10. Sautman, Barry. “Anti-Black Racism in Post-Mao China.” China
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11. Sullivan, Michael J. “The 1988–89 Nanjing Anti-African Protests:
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438–57.
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David. “Chinese Students Bar Traffic, Taunt Police in Anti-African
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24, 2014. http://articles.latimes.com/1988-12-29/news/mn-
1285_1_african-student.
13. Holley, David. “Chinese March in 4th Day of Anti-African
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24, 2014. http://articles.latimes.com/1988-12-28/news/mn-
912_1_african-students; Chung, Erin. “Nanjing Anti-African Protests
of 1988–89.” The Institute for Diasporic Studies, Northwestern
University, n.d. Accessed October 24, 2014.
http://diaspora.northwestern.edu/mbin/WebObjects/DiasporaX.woa/wa/displayArt
atomid=711.
14. Chung, “Nanjing Anti-African Protests of 1988–89.”
15. Sullivan, “The 1988–89 Nanjing Anti-African Protests.”
16. Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N., and Elizabeth J. Perry. “Acting Out
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2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994, 35.
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Democracy.” Chicago Tribune (Beijing), July 3, 1989. Accessed May
29, 2014. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-07-
03/news/8902140570_1_Tian​anmen-square-english-corner-
democracy-movement.
18. “Chinese Defy Police Orders, Meet to Practice English.”
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nid=861&dat=19891226&id=CBtQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ZlYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=1677,605
19. The Face of China, “English Corner.”
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Public Opinion on the South and East China Sea Disputes.” Perth
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21. Gao, Helen. “Diaoyu in Our Heart: The Revealing Contradictions
of Chinese Nationalism.” The Atlantic, August 22, 2012. Accessed
May 29, 2014.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/diaoyu-in-
our-heart-the-revealing-contradictions-of-chinese-
nationalism/261422/.
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24. Yu, Xie. “ 2014” [China Minsheng Development Report 2014].
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Life.” Pew Research Center, October 23, 2014. Accessed October 25,
2014. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/23/where-
people-say-giving-bribes-gets-you-ahead-in-life/.
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31. Zhang, Xiaonan. Interview by author, Beijing, September 2011.
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224
Notes

225
 Index

2
2008 Beijing Olympics, 1 , 2 , 3

A
anti-cnn.com, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
anti-Japanese sentiment, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2
aging population, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

bare branches, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

Bo Xilai, 1 , 2
brain drain, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
Buddhism, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

censorship, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12.1-12.2

Central Committee of the Communist Party, 1 , 2
century of humiliation, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3
cheating (academic), 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4
Chinese dream, 1.1-1.2
Christianity, 1 , 2.1-2.2
civil service, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5
civil society See nongovernmental organizations
college entrance exam See gaokao
Confucianism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
connections See guanxi
corruption
in education, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7
in employment, 1 , 2.1-2.2
in government, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9 , 10 , 11
, 12.1-12.2 , 13
in journalism, 1.1-1.2
countryside See rural China
Cultural Revolution, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

D
democracy, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5

226
diaosi, 1.1-1.2
domestic violence, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

Economic Observer, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2

economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
end of history See Fukuyama, Francis
entrepreneurship, 1 , 2.1-2.2
environmental issues, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4

family planning policy, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4

Foxconn, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
fu’erdai, 1 , 2 , 3
Fukuyama, Francis, 1 , 2 , 3

gaokao, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8

gender imbalance, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6
guan’erdai, 1.1-1.2
guanxi, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6

H
higher education reform, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2
Hong Xiuquan See Taiping Rebellion
household registration See hukou
housing costs, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6
Hu Jintao, 1 , 2
hukou, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

ideological vacuum, 1 , 2 , 3
inflation, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4

J
Jiang Zemin, 1 , 2 , 3
June 4th Movement See Tiananmen Square
Junxun, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2

227
L

labor unrest, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2

leftover women See shengnu
Lei Feng, 1.1-1.2

M
Mao Zedong, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11
Marxism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8
materialism, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10
May 4th movement, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
middle class, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
migrant workers, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2
military training See Junxun
Ministry of Education, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6
morality, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4

nationalism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2

nepotism, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2

one-child policy See family planning policy

Patriotic Education campaign, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3

Peking University, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5
People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2
PLA See People’s Liberation Army
political apathy, 1 , 2 , 3
pollution See environmental issues
post-90s generation, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ,
12.1-12.2 , 13
Project 211, 1 , 2
prostitution, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2
public security See stability maintenance

Reform and Opening Up, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

228
Renmin University, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2
rule of law, 1 , 2 , 3
rural China, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2

scams, 1.1-1.2 , 2
second generation officials See guan’erdai
second generation rich See fu’erdai
sexual assault, 1.1-1.2
sexual harassment, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4
shengnu, 1.1-1.2
Sina Weibo, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11.1-11.2 , 12
socialism with Chinese characteristics, 1 , 2 , 3
Southern Weekend, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6
stability maintenance, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7
state-owned enterprises, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5
student protests, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7
See also Tiananmen Square
suicide, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2
Supreme People’s Court, 1 , 2

Taiping Rebellion, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3

Tiananmen Square
1989 protests, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10.1-10.2
25th anniversary of 1989 protests, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3
Tsinghua University, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7

unemployment, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2

wealth inequality, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11

Weibo See Sina Weibo

Xi Jinping, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10

229
Table of Contents
Title Page 2
Preface 5
Getting Educated 10
Boot Camp 11
The Test 26
The University 41
The Patriots 54
Going to Work 68
Factory Town 69
The Ants 84
The Golden Rice Bowl 99
The Entrepreneurs 112
Coping 125
The Leftovers 126
Eating Bitterness 140
Finding Faith 152
Pushing Back 167
The Social Activists 168
The Environmentalists 180
The Journalists 193
Generations 209
Notes 225
Index 226

230