The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (10 page)

Pu quickly took on more. He defended newspapers, magazines, and writers whose work offended powerful party bosses. Pu had begun to make a name for himself as one of China’s leading free speech attorneys. He was not always successful, indeed not usually. Sometimes the best outcome was to prevent there from being any outcome at all. For example, there was
the case of Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao. The husband-and-wife team had written a best-selling book that detailed the tyranny and abuse meted out by a local party official in Fuyang, a city in the hardscrabble eastern province of Anhui. Zhang Xide, the official exposed in Chen and Wu’s book, sued the authors for defamation of character. Typically, defendants like Chen and Wu would stand no chance. When a party official is sitting in the plaintiff’s chair, it is hardly a surprise that judges, who are themselves party members, rule in favor of their political masters. But Pu made that outcome next to impossible. In his cross-examinations, he aggressively attacked the prosecution’s witnesses, putting the spotlight on the corrupt practices that had marked Zhang’s rule. Even more effectively, Pu called a string of witnesses, most of them poor peasants, who recounted story after story of Zhang’s corruption, abuse, and draconian enforcement of the one-child policy. Each witness’s testimony added further evidence of the claims made in Chen and Wu’s book. As Philip Pan, a
Washington Post
reporter who attended the trial, wrote, the court faced a terrible choice: “
It could ignore the evidence [Pu] presented in open
court about Zhang’s transgressions and rule against the authors, risking a backlash that could further erode the party’s legitimacy. Or it could reject Zhang’s lawsuit and send a powerful message to the public about the law as a weapon against the party.”

Confronted with such a dilemma, the court chose a different tack: it issued no decision at all. When Pu and I met, it had been more than six years since those legal proceedings had ended. And still there had been no verdict. For a free speech attorney in China, that counts as a win.

What struck me most as Pu talked into the night about how he worked the seams of his country’s authoritarian system was the way he dealt with the people he knew best: the secret police dispatched to monitor his every move. His tactic, as much as anything, seemed to be to humanize them. They may be on opposite ends of a fundamental disagreement—whether the rule of the Chinese Communist Party is legitimate or not—but that did not erase his interest in dealing with them as people. When I raised this with him, his brawny frame rose in its seat. “I respect them, I respect them. I constantly tell them what the procedures are,” Pu replied, stubbing out his fourth cigarette to emphasize the point. “If you come to my office and you want to detain me, okay, then there’s a procedure to go through. You need a certificate to do that. They can’t provide it, so the result is we have dinner, we drink, we talk with each other. We need to face the secret police. Why not try to change them, if you have the chance to do that?”

Has he succeeded? It’s almost impossible to know. When they are pressed and Pu corners his security minders with the force of his argument, they admit they agree with some of what he says, but then they fall back on familiar excuses: We have no choice. If we weren’t working for the state’s security apparatus, what would we be doing? Pu tells them that they are selling themselves short, that they have options above and beyond those presented by the state. And then he leaves them something to ponder. “I tell them, ‘China is going through a transformation. We’re about the same age. Twenty years from now, what will you tell your children you were doing during the transformative years?’ ” says Pu.

Like most things, it’s an argument Pu thinks he can win, if only because the other side doesn’t have a persuasive case. “The people that
I meet, they have no sense of pride in what they’re doing,” he tells me. “The ideology and the legitimacy of the party has already disappeared. It’s naked interests. The slogans, they don’t work anymore. They need to buy people; they need to pay them for them to do anything.” They may be threatened or coerced or they may be bribed, but either way the costs of running the regime are rising.

Near the end of our hours together, I asked Pu how he thought the revolutions stretching across North Africa and the Middle East were affecting China’s leadership. “They are getting more afraid, and there are less choices for them. They have this need to maintain stability, and the regime, Hu and Wen, appears to be less confident than when they took power.” The most immediate evidence of that insecurity was the lengths to which Pu and I had to go to even meet on this evening. Again, Pu drew conclusions from the faces of the regime he knew best. “They are very cautious; they’re nervous, very nervous,” he told me, speaking of the security detail following him around. “Many of them have accompanied me to dinner just because of these [revolutions in the Middle East].” He would tell them they are wasting their time. Pu isn’t a protest organizer, and he isn’t rallying people to take to the streets. If the regime has enemies, it’s because it creates them, he says. “You make so many enemies, and you don’t have the guts to face your enemies,” he told them. “You should find ways to prove that you are different from Gaddafi.” I asked him how his friends in the secret police replied. “They agreed with that,” he said.

It was now well past midnight. We walked out of the teahouse, down the street, and toward Yihai Garden, the compound of apartments where Pu lives. It was already Sunday, and the second anonymous call for a Chinese “Jasmine Revolution” had gone out, asking people to assemble in nearly two dozen sites across China later that day. Neither one of us expected much would come from it, but it was significant that the online call had been made at all. For Pu, the bigger question was whether the government would restrict his movements through some form of house arrest. “A lot of things have happened to other people, and I hope I don’t make trouble for myself, but I am not afraid of trouble,” he told me. Pu said there was only one thing certain about tomorrow. “He will come,” referring to a member of the secret police. As I got in a cab and rode away, I saw Pu walk through the
gates of his apartment’s compound. He nodded to the security guard on duty as he entered.

Yevgenia Chirikova moved to Khimki for the forest. In 2000, she and her husband decided it was time to leave the urban confines of Moscow for a more natural setting. Their jobs required that they stay close to the city, but they wanted to find a more peaceful place to raise a family. They settled on Khimki, a small community about an hour northwest of Moscow. At first glance, this town of nearly 200,000 isn’t particularly picturesque. Most of Khimki’s residents live in drab, Soviet-era apartment buildings arranged on grids with narrow rows of sidewalks and strips of grass between them. During the height of the Cold War, Khimki was a closed city, off-limits to any foreigners and most Russians because of the strategically important work its townspeople did. Locals worked in several aerospace defense factories, churning out surface-to-air missiles and advanced engines to power Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. But Yevgenia and her husband moved to the suburban enclave because of one of its other vestiges: the Khimki Forest Park.

Covering an area of roughly twenty-five hundred acres, the Khimki Forest is a rarity in Russia—a publicly protected green space. The land is said to have been one of the czars’ favorite spots for hunting boars. The boars—along with elk, foxes, rabbit, and many species of birds—still wander the dense oak groves, but the expanse of wild forest has dwindled to its present size after decades of development. Nevertheless, what was left had been set aside as environmentally protected lands; indeed, the Khimki woods had received the government’s highest level of green zoning, ensuring that it would remain free from commercial use. (The law was so stringent that, technically, anyone found guilty of cutting down a tree in a specially designated “forest park” could be punished with prison time.) So, seeking a refuge of their own, Yevgenia and her husband bought a house at the edge of the forest. “
When we lived in Moscow, it was just so polluted, and over here it was very green and peaceful and nice,” says Yevgenia. “We decided it was the place to be.”

In 2008, Yevgenia was at home on maternity leave with her second child. She bundled up her baby girl and five-year-old daughter and went for a walk in the woods. As she made her way under the oaks, she noticed something she had never seen before: many trees had been marked with red paint, and others had small cuts in the trunks. When she returned home, she went online to investigate. There, sitting with her husband, she found a document from the office of the region’s governor, Boris Gromov, that explained why the trees behind her house had been painted red: Khimki Forest had been marked for demolition. It was to be clear-cut to make way for a new highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The governor’s order left Yevgenia confused. She knew the land was legally protected. She thought it must be a mistake. If she just wrote a letter and informed the proper authorities, she was sure the error would be corrected. Recalling that day, she says, “I was very naive.”

There hadn’t been a mistake. After writing ten letters to the authorities, she received a pro forma reply from the government saying it was a normal project and it was going forward. But in truth, there was nothing normal about the construction that the local authorities had in mind. No one in the Khimki community had been informed about the project or the destruction of their forest. The only public notice of the project appeared in a small local paper, sandwiched between advertisements for fortune-telling, and failed to even mention Khimki Forest or the new highway. What was most odd, however, was the route that the highway would take. Initially, the road would follow the path that had been carved out many years earlier for the October railway line that connects Moscow to St. Petersburg. That railway follows a direct path between the cities. This proposed highway, however, would make a curious detour. After crossing the Moscow Ring Road, it veers sharply toward the northeast, directly through Khimki’s forestland. Once it has passed through the seven kilometers of the forest, the road loops back to the October railway line’s more direct route and continues to St. Petersburg. Yevgenia pulled out a map of the area and sketched the path of the planned highway construction for me with her finger. The proposed ten-lane highway literally takes a sudden detour to careen into these pristine lands. “In fact, this road [would] run through all the protected territories we have in this area,”
Yevgenia tells me. Nevertheless, by the time she had taken her walk in the woods and discovered the trees marked to be bulldozed, Governor Gromov and Khimki’s mayor, Vladimir Strelchenko, had already approved the project.

It’s impossible to know for certain why the authorities had set a path that would cut through the heart of Khimki Forest. A government as opaque as Russia’s isn’t in the habit of offering its citizens explanations, and the deliberations among Governor Gromov, Mayor Strelchenko, and the minister of transportation, Igor Levitin, have never been made public. Yevgenia and her neighbors can only speculate.

The most obvious explanation is money. Charting a path through environmentally protected lands—an area that has no private land—would avoid creating disputes that result in paying compensation to landowners along the highway’s path. Civil engineers would not be required to build tunnels, overpasses, and ramps to navigate preexisting development. But the potential profits are probably an even greater motive. The highway’s detour through Khimki Forest would bring the road extremely close to Sheremetyevo International Airport, the second largest in the country. Any road that links Moscow and St. Petersburg, enjoys close proximity to an international airport, and could have generous-sized lots with century-old oaks dotted along the way would be a developer’s dream. The corruption and graft that surround Russia’s construction industry are the stuff of legend. According to a Russian anticorruption group,
new roads in Russia cost roughly $237 million a kilometer; in the United States, it is roughly $6 million for the same distance. Russian roads, it is safe to say, are some of the most expensive in the world. (Incidentally, the government gets very little for its money;
its roadway infrastructure is ranked 111th, among the world’s worst.) The government officials approving the highway project almost certainly stood to benefit personally.

There existed a clear conflict of interest for Igor Levitin, the minister of transportation. “He is the director of Sheremetyevo airport,” Yevgenia explains. “So at one and the same time he is a minister and private entrepreneur.” In fact,
Levitin is the head of several commercial enterprises tied to the airport; among them, he was chairman of the board of directors of Aeroflot, which is based at Sheremetyevo. “I
asked the bureaucrats, ‘How could that be?’ They said, ‘Very simple. When he’s in the ministry, he is the minister. When he comes to the airport, he is the minister as well, but he represents the interests of private business, too.’ ” Yevgenia looked at me with disbelief.

With her two baby girls in tow, Yevgenia returned to the forest. This time, she came armed with flyers to post on some of the same trees the government planned to clear. Her flyers told residents about the planned highway construction and encouraged them to come to her house for an organizational meeting. More than a hundred people showed up to the first meeting. She was surprised by the turnout. Like her, many of her neighbors wanted to help save the community’s forest. Soon, with the help of fellow residents, she founded the group Defenders of Khimki Forest. She created a Web site for her movement,
www.ecmo.ru
; began organizing demonstrations, protests, and rallies; started a petition drive; and worked with local journalists to publicize her efforts to preserve the very thing that drew her to this community. Yevgenia didn’t realize it right away, but her transformation into a grassroots environmental activist had begun. “An organization like Greenpeace is trying to rescue or save a forest in some place far away like Siberia or Sochi, but they are not involved in smaller, local problems,” she says. “We had to do it ourselves.”