The Contest of the Century (30 page)

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CCTV America’s first show aired on February 6, 2012. Two days later, a man named Wang Lijun walked into the U.S. consulate in the Chinese city of Chengdu and set off the biggest political scandal in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. In the process, he also exposed why CCTV America and China’s overseas media push will likely fail.

Wang was the police chief in Chongqing, a large city in the center-west of China, a few hundred kilometers from Chengdu. He sought refuge in the U.S. consulate after falling out with Bo Xilai, the local party boss. And he started talking. Wang brought a series of stories about corruption, legal abuses, and power grabs in Chongqing. The most explosive tale involved Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, who he claimed was responsible for the death a few months earlier in a Chongqing hotel room of Neil Heywood, a British businessman. The son of a famous Communist revolutionary, Bo had been considered a shoo-in to be promoted that autumn to the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party body that really runs the country. Instead, Bo was relieved of his duties and expelled from the Communist Party, and his wife was charged with the murder of Heywood. It was the most damaging and open split in the top levels of the party in two decades.

Before long, the revelations were falling thick and fast. Elite-level
politics in China is still something of a black box, but for once foreign journalists working in China had a glimpse inside. Within weeks, Bloomberg had revealed the $240-million family fortune that the Bo clan had managed to build up, my colleagues at the
Financial Times
had talked to a Chongqing billionaire who had been tortured and squeezed out of his fortune by rivals friendly with Bo, and the
Wall Street Journal
had detailed the complex relations between Heywood and the Bo clan. It was a tour de force of foreign correspondence. It was also the biggest political story in China in two decades. And yet almost none of it appeared on CCTV America. “There are certain issues that will not be covered by state TV in China,” Laurie admits.

A couple of weeks after CCTV America started broadcasting from its new Washington studio, I got to meet Wadah Khanfar, the former director general of Al Jazeera and the man who helped turn it into an internationally recognized network. Al Jazeera demonstrated that there really is a market for non-Western news. Yet, in describing the network’s early brushes with the U.S. authorities and its empathy for the stories of ordinary people, Khanfar talked about Al Jazeera in a way that could not have been more different from CCTV. The network first came to prominence during the Iraq War for broadcasting stories that the Western press were unable to. As security deteriorated across Iraq after the invasion, Western reporters found that important parts of the country were simply too dangerous to spend much time in. Al Jazeera filled this gap. While the Bush administration was still insisting that ordinary Iraqis had been liberated, Al Jazeera articulated the mounting rage against the occupation. Its message was implicitly anti-Western, which infuriated the Pentagon. But it was also largely correct.

A decade later, now with its own English-language channel, Al Jazeera hit another journalistic gold mine when the Arab Spring started. The self-immolation of a disgruntled trader in rural Tunisia became the unlikely spark for an astonishing wave of political change from Cairo to Benghazi, fueled by ordinary people standing up to despotic leaders. Al Jazeera was there once again to record their frustrations. Khanfar talked passionately about how grassroots political movements were finally changing a region whose politics had been ossified for so long. And he made no attempt to hide the network’s role in pushing their
agenda. “We were the voice of the Arab Spring,” he proudly declared. Some of that spirit has spilled over into its coverage of China. Over the last decade and a half, the Chinese authorities have expelled only one foreign correspondent working in the country. Hassling and lectures are common, and some journalists have been beaten by local thugs. But only one reporter has actually had a visa rescinded because of official displeasure at the reporting. Her name was Melissa Chan, and she worked for Al Jazeera.

To be sure, the Western media do a partial job in China. Sometimes that is down to our prejudices, which can push some reporters to only see events through a narrow human-rights prism. Sometimes it is down to our personal limitations, in language or education. But mostly it is down to the nature of the political system, which still remains largely impenetrable. There is a global audience that would love to have more information about what is really happening in China—not out of hostility toward the Communist Party, as Beijing officials imagine, but out of genuine curiosity. That means there is endless demand to know more about the thoughts and personalities of the people who lead the second-most-important country in the world. But there is little appetite for insipid propaganda. The best way for a new network or paper to establish itself is to identify a huge story where it has some advantage and to plunge wholeheartedly into that story. Al Jazeera won itself an audience by broadcasting important tales that the Western media could not match. The gap in the international market where CCTV America could really make its name is the real story about China. But that is a story CCTV cannot tell.

VELVET PRISON

On the December day when his close friend Liu Xiaobo was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, the Chinese human-rights lawyer Teng Biao found himself staying at the upmarket Shengping Yuan Hotel, just over an hour’s drive north of Beijing. At that time, Liu was one year into an eleven-year sentence for “subverting state power,” which he was serving at a prison in the bitterly cold northeast. Back in Beijing, the authorities operated on the principle of guilt by association. Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu
Xia, had prepared a list of 143 friends and family members whom he would like to represent him. Everyone on the list who was still in China was barred from leaving the country. The crackdown on Liu’s supposed sympathizers sometimes verged on the surreal. A few days before the ceremony, Mao Yushi, an eighty-one-year-old economist and occasional government critic, was supposed to travel to Singapore to give a speech on the development of rivers in the Himalayan region. He was stopped at Beijing airport and told that his planned trip was a “threat to national security.” The climate of intimidation, he said, “reminds me of the Cultural Revolution,” when his wife’s hair was shaved by Red Guards and he was tortured and imprisoned.

Teng Biao’s prison was of the velvet kind. A lecturer at Beijing’s University of Politics and Law, Teng had also worked part-time for the previous decade as a lawyer, taking on cases about forced abortions and illegal land seizures. He was also one of the original signatories of Charter 08, the pro-democracy petition that Liu Xiaobo helped write, which was based on Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 and was the real reason for his long prison sentence. The Beijing authorities wanted to prevent Teng, who keeps copies of the political writings of Václav Havel on his bookshelf, from holding any public celebration of the Nobel. They also wanted to stop him from talking with the foreign journalists in Beijing, whose daily dispatches on the prize were a constant embarrassment for the government. So, along with a large number of activists, he was taken on an enforced trip out of Beijing, at the taxpayers’ expense. The hotel where he was staying is just north of Badaling Station, on the Great Wall, one of Beijing’s most visited places, and right next door is the Longqing Gorge, a beautiful limestone canyon with a fifty-meter-high waterfall.

One of the least understood powers of authoritarian regimes, but one which Havel knew well, is arbitrariness. In their bid to intimidate and punish Liu Xiaobo’s friends, the Chinese authorities mixed subtlety with crude thuggery. Hua Ze, an independent journalist who used to make documentaries for state TV, had a black hood thrust over her head by the police, who took her into detention for nearly two months, during which she was also beaten. Yu Jie, another close friend of Liu’s who was writing his biography, suffered a similar fate. The day before the prize ceremony, he was taken in a hood by state security agents to a
prison, where he was burned with cigarette butts. “Right now,
foreigners are awarding Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, humiliating our party and government. We’ll pound you to death to avenge this,” the leading security official told him. “If the order comes from above, we can dig a pit to bury you alive in half an hour, and no one on earth would know.” Yu now lives in exile in Washington.

Yet, like Teng Biao, the poet A’Er had a more luxurious brush with the law. He was kept for several days at a holiday villa to the west of Beijing in Pinggu and wrote a poem about a tree trapped in rock that he could see from his window. When he was released, A’Er fled to Lijiang, his hometown, a popular tourist spot in the southwest much prized for its moderate climate and mountain walks. Eight plainclothes policemen followed him and stayed to keep an eye on him during his three-week stay. Teng Biao was held at his Beijing resort for three days. At first he was allowed to make phone calls, though not to receive them. From his bathroom, he called a friend, gave him the sign-on to his Twitter account, and asked him to write some messages commemorating Liu Xiaobo’s award. He got four tweets published before the police discovered the ruse and took away his mobile. “They were incredibly angry,” he later told me. “But I was very pleased with myself.”

At the heart of Beijing’s soft-power drive is the notion that if China somehow had better PR its image would change. If Chinese media only had a higher profile overseas, or if China had an appealing set of values to sell to the world, or if the leaders had a snappier phrase with which to frame China’s ambitions, then people would start to think differently about the country. They might start to “love China, to long for China,” as the Olympics deputy director had hoped. But the harsh truth is that China’s ability to project soft power is hampered by the reality of life in China. The effort to project some form of “humane authority” is constantly undermined by the real-life capriciousness of China’s leaders. It is hard to make a society seem attractive when those who disagree with the carefully policed mainstream are persecuted in such a way, when dissent is criminalized, and when those who seek to criticize are brushed aside so ruthlessly. The problem is the messenger, not the message. One of the strategic goals of the soft-power push is to present an unthreatening vision to the world of what a powerful China might
portend, but it is persistently undercut by the reality of what a powerful China means for the more awkward members of Chinese society.

Liu Xiaobo and his friends missed a somewhat melancholic ceremony in Oslo. Thorbjorn Jagland, the head of the Nobel Committee, brought in the red binder with gold trim that holds the Nobel citation. He then placed it on an empty chair. What they witnessed at home was an outbreak of paranoia. On the day of the ceremony, the prize was described as a “political farce” by Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu. “Prejudice and lies are untenable and the Cold War mentality has no popular support,” she said. Chinese officials warned Norway that business deals were now under threat. Ambassadors in China were called in by the Foreign Ministry and told that their governments should not have anyone present at the ceremony in Oslo. In the end, nineteen of the countries said that their ambassadors would not attend the prize ceremony. Most were obvious bedfellows of an irate Beijing—for instance, Cuba, Russia, and Sudan. But there were a few surprises as well, such as Colombia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Chinese officials claimed that 101 countries in total had expressed opposition toward having the prize awarded to Liu Xiaobo. The
Global Times
, a nationalist tabloid and sister publication of party mouthpiece the
People’s Daily
, wrote: “All the applause has come from the West and the citizens of the third-world countries are all now China’s allies.” Dai Bingguo, China’s senior foreign-policy official, told Hillary Clinton that the prize was part of an American conspiracy to weaken China. Speaking a few months later, a senior Chinese official captured the tone of self-pitying victimization that underpinned Beijing’s aggressive reaction. “The Nobel Prize was a wake-up call about the existence of a difference over ideology that many here thought had fallen away as a result of the growth of the Chinese economy,” the official said. “This prize makes us think that maybe the Cold War is not entirely over. The cloud is still there.”

China treats soft power as a problem that can be solved by bureaucrats. Beijing throws money at it, just as it has with high-speed rail or wind power, attracting brand-name international architects with bigticket commissions. But modernity is not something that can be bought off-the-shelf. Soft power is generated by society from the creativity of its citizens, not created by culture ministries. China hopes its soft-power
investments will blunt criticism of its political system, but it is the political system that is holding back its soft power. The cast of people who were harassed during the Nobel ceremony underlines the central dilemma. Among the political activists, there were also poets, writers, journalists, lawyers, and other members of the intellectual elite. (Before he became more involved in politics, Liu Xiaobo was the
enfant terrible
of Chinese literary criticism.) China is fighting a soft-power battle with one hand tied behind its back. It wants to channel the energies of the country’s leading thinkers into helping define a vision of a modern China that will appeal to the rest of the world. But it also punishes those who step too far out of line from the official script.

Take the two artists most closely associated with the Beijing Olympics, the film director Zhang Yimou and Ai Weiwei, the sculptor who helped two Swiss architects with the design of the stunning Bird’s Nest stadium. These are the sorts of figures with the talent to shape a distinctive and attractive Chinese modernity, to persuade the rest of the world that the future will be shaped by Chinese and not American imaginations. Yet Ai Weiwei spent two months in jail in 2011 because of his criticisms of the government and is now banned from talking to the media. (He was “harmonized,” as ironical young Chinese activists say whenever one of their number is harassed by the born-again Confucian authorities.) A few weeks before his arrest, he told me: “Mao used to say that the Communists came to power on the back of the gun and the pen. But the pen is not working anymore.” If Ai revels in the status he has now as a leading dissident, Zhang Yimou is still very much in favor with the establishment. He has become the Communist Party’s in-house creative director. After his Olympics success, he was asked to put on a grand pageant in Tiananmen Square on the evening of the 2009 military parade. But even this status does not afford him any more real creative space. I once asked Zhang why his recent films had all been period pieces that shunned the fascinating complexities of contemporary China. If he made a film about today’s China, he said, he would have so many problems with the censors that it would not be worth his trouble.