By that point, practitioners had learned that peaceful protest was an effective tool, and they had also become efficiently organized. In April of 1999, a journal at Tianjin University published unflattering comments about Li Hongzhi, who had emigrated to the United States. Thousands of believers collected on the campus, but this time the journal refused to publish a retraction. Finally, the protestors traveled to Beijing, hoping to address the nation’s leaders directly, and that was the April 25 demonstration that I had witnessed. On that day, high-ranking officials had finally agreed to meet with Falun Gong representatives, who made their case and then told the crowd to disperse peacefully.
The protest ended without incident, but a line had been crossed. For the first time, the nation’s leaders realized how well organized Falun Gong had become. In the weeks that followed, the government responded with the sort of silence that was always a bad sign in China. Beijing newspapers didn’t publish a word about the protest; nothing appeared on the television news. There was no debate, no public discourse, no commentary of any sort. For weeks the city waited.
And then the storm broke: on July 22, the government banned Falun Gong. There were more protests, followed by arrests; leaders were sentenced to labor camps. On October 26, the Communists stepped up the attack, initiating a shrill public campaign that declared Falun Gong an “evil cult.” But practitioners kept demonstrating. Often they traveled to Tiananmen Square, where they unfurled banners, sat in the lotus position, or raised their arms over their heads—the starting point for Falun Gong exercises. Plainclothes cops staked out the square. Foreign journalists watched. Soon, Hong Kong-based human rights groups began to report incidents of practitioners beaten to death while in police custody.
In February, a grandmother named Chen Zixiu died while being held by the police in a small city in Shandong province. She was one of the many who had tried to come to Beijing to protest; a plainclothes officer nabbed Chen before she had even made it to the Square. (Practitioners refused to lie about their faith, so cops often patrolled the region around Tiananmen, asking people if they were believers.) After Chen Zixiu’s death, her daughter searched for somebody to tell the story; through various connections, she eventually contacted Ian Johnson. He met the woman and published the article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. After it appeared, Ian followed up by researching the Falun Gong structure, as well as the nature of the police response. He discovered that it was another instance of top-down commands: local police units were being fined for every believer who slipped through their clutches and made it to Beijing to protest. What started at the top as an idea—ban Falun Gong—materialized at the lowest levels as sheer brutality, for the stupidest, most pragmatic reason of all: money.
And then, before you knew it, April 25 had rolled around again, and the Bejing calendar had a new anniversary.
April 25, 2000
I take the mid-morning shift, just after Ian has left the Square. The sky is yellow: Beijing is in the midst of a spring sandstorm, one of those heavy-lidded days when the grit blows south from the Gobi. I can taste the wind in my teeth.
On the Square, plainclothes cops are everywhere—some pose as souvenir vendors; others pretend to be tourists. As usual, many seem to be crew-cut men in worn trousers and cheap windbreakers. Their clothes are bad, and they are bad at plainclothes: they linger and loiter; they stand and stare. They have a tendency to point. It takes only a moment to realize that these men have not been well trained, but their job is to intimidate, not infiltrate. They seem to have been given only one command: remove any protestor immediately, by any means necessary.
They watch for demonstrators, and they also keep an eye out for foreign journalists. The cameramen are doomed—guaranteed detention, almost every time. The only question is whether they can get a shot off and hide the film before the cops grab them. It’s easier for print journalists, as long as we follow certain rules. Never write anything in public; don’t pull out a notebook; avoid talking to anybody in Chinese. Try to blend in with the tourists. If you’re detained, simply insist that you were visiting the Square.
I slip in with an American tour group. It’s good camouflage—most of the men, like me, wear baseball caps. And I recognize their accent: the flat vowels and hard Rs of the Midwest. One man tells me he’s from Illinois; another comes from Iowa. We gather around the young Chinese guide, who leads us to the flagpole at the north end of the Square. A lecture begins:
Red is the color of Communism. In China, it also has a traditional meaning of happiness. The big yellow star represents the Communist Party. The smaller yellow stars represent the four classes: the soldiers, the peasants, the workers, the scientists.
The lecture turns personal. The guide has a cousin who used to serve in the color guard on the Square. For hours on end, the cousin stood perfectly still next to the flagpole, and pride in the job kept him from getting tired. Jiade story, I think to myself, and then a small man directly in front of us drops into the lotus position.
Shouts, commands, people running: a half-dozen plainclothes cops. By the time they force the man to his feet, a van is already speeding toward us from a far corner of the Square. The protestor says nothing. He is about thirty-five years old, and he wears simple peasant clothes of blue cotton. His limbs go slack; they carry him into the van. Sheets have been tied over the windows so nobody can see inside. They drive back to the far corner.
“Goddamn,” says one of the Midwesterners. “He was just sitting therre on the ground.”
Another tourist, a fat man with a red face, had successfully taken a photograph.
“I got a picturr!” he shouts. “I got a picturr of that!” He grins and waves his camera. He sees me staring and walks over, face beaming. “Damn if I didn’t get a picturr!”
“You should put the camera away,” I say softly. But another van has already sped over. A uniformed officer points at the fat Midwesterner.
“Give me your camera,” he says in Chinese.
The guide hurries over to translate. The Midwesterner hands it over without any resistance; the cop strips out the film. He speaks to the guide, who suddenly looks worried.
“He says we have to go with him,” the guide says. “He wants us to go to a department. He has to ask you some questions.”
The fat man stands therre with his mouth open. I decide that this is a good time to disassociate myself from Middle America. I wander off the Square for a few minutes, and when I return, a middle-aged woman tries to unfurl a banner in front of the flagpole. A plainclothes man tackles her hard. The next protestor is also a woman. She stands to the right of the flagpole and puts both arms over her head; two men run over and force her arms down.
Nearby, I spot an Italian tour group. It’s hopeless—all of the men are nicely dressed—but I take off my baseball cap in a feeble attempt to appear European. The Chinese guide speaks in Italian, and I pretend to understand, imagining the words: “The big yellow star represents…” But a few feet away, a crewcut man watches me closely, and then he says something to another crewcut man. I decide that it’s time to leave.
Suddenly, there is a commotion at the flagpole. A dozen at once: men and women, shouting slogans, raising their arms. Another banner. The plainclothes men rush over; punches are thrown; people cry out. A man falls to the ground and gets kicked. Kicked again. Kicked again. One by one, the demonstrators are dragged away.
At the end, a child stands there alone. She is about seven years old, and probably she came with her mother or father, but all the adults have already been forced into the van. The girl wears a green sweater, with matching ribbons in her hair. She hangs her head as the cops march her to the vehicle.
The Italian tour group stares at the van. Nobody says anything; the silence sits as heavy as the yellow air. The child is the last believer to be taken off the Square.
CADRES
CENSORSHIP
CITIES
CIVIL SOCIETY
CONFUCIUS
> CONSTITUTION
CONSUMER
CPPCC
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Back in the bureau, I filed foreign reports of the protests, and I wrote stories of my own. But I couldn’t make sense of it—neither the anniversary nor the scenes on the Square. Scholars often talked about the shift toward the rule of law, and I sensed that someday, after the changes in China had settled, it would seem like a progression that had moved logically from one point to another. But to live in the middle of this process felt entirely different. I could eat a meal in Hollywood, surrounded by prostitutes, black marketers, and illegal money changers; and then I’d bicycle for fifteen minutes and watch somebody get arrested for raising his arms over his head.
At the personal level, it was easier to figure out. Most simply, it was natural for individuals in China to break the law. There were endless regulations, and many of them were unreasonable; the country changed so quickly that even rational rules slipped out of date. Virtually every Chinese citizen whom I came to know well was doing something technically illegal, although usually the infraction was so minor that they didn’t have to worry. It might be a sketchy apartment registration or a small business that bought its products from unlicensed wholesalers. Sometimes, it was comic: late at night, there were always people out walking their dogs in Beijing, because the official dog registration was ridiculously expensive. The dogs were usually ratlike Pekingese, led by sleepy owners who snapped to alertness if they saw a cop. They were guerillas walking toy dogs.
Regardless of what kind of problem an individual had, it was his problem, and only he could do something about it. Without the sense of a rational system, people rarely felt connected to the troubles of others. The crackdown on Falun Gong should have been disturbing to most Chinese—the group had done nothing worse than make a series of minor political miscalculations that had added up. But few average people expressed sympathy for the believers, because they couldn’t imagine how that issue could be connected to their own relationship with the law. In part, this was cultural—the Chinese had never stressed strong community bonds; the family and other more immediate groups were the ones that mattered most. But the lack of a rational legal climate also encouraged people to focus strictly on their own problems.
A foreigner inevitably felt even more isolated. I lived in the same environment as everybody else—the blurred laws, the necessary infractions—but I had even less stake in the system. Regardless of how much sympathy I might have for a protestor on the Square, I still viewed him through a screen, because there was no chance that I would ever be in that situation. I wasn’t going to get beaten to death by the police or sent to a labor camp. The worst the government could do was kick me out of the country. Sometimes it bothered me, because my own Chinese life seemed a parody of certain things that I observed. But in the midst of events it was rare to find time for thoughtfulness; usually, I just had to get things done. That was one connection that I had with many citizens—all of us were coldly pragmatic.
That spring, after more than a year of query letters, I finally received an assignment from National Geographic magazine. They asked me to visit some archaeological sites in China, but I had to do so under official auspices, via a short-term journalist visa. The Chinese government wouldn’t grant access to a writer who lived illegally in Beijing.
Fortunately, I had acquired a second U.S. passport. I flew to Hong Kong, switched passports, and applied for the journalist visa. After that, I crossed the border to Shenzhen, using my new visa, and then I continued to the archaeological sites. Once the research was finished, I returned to Hong Kong and then recrossed the border with my old passport.
I knew that this kind of routine would appear suspicious to any Chinese authority who happened to notice. If they examined me closely, they’d find other sketchy details: I didn’t have a legal job, and I wasn’t registered in my apartment. I spent a lot of time in Yabaolu, hanging out with Uighurs and middlemen. I had filed a police report after getting robbed on the North Korean border. Four years ago, the United States government had sent me to China as a member of the Peace Corps, an organization that had been founded during the height of the cold war.
I assumed that the authorities knew everything—but that was different from knowing everything at once. This was only guesswork, but my sense had always been that the government was much better at acquiring information than analyzing it. Whenever I imagined their files, I thought of something infinitely bigger than those in the Wall Street Journal bureau, and organized according to some system that was far more whimsical than the alphabet. My journalist visa might be recorded in one place; my business visa in another; my bogus apartment registration was somewhere else.
But if I happened to attract attention, it might all come together at once. That fear was always in the back of my mind, especially now that I was finding more work as a journalist. In May, I sold my first story to the New Yorker, and then the magazine published my article about the robbery in Dandong. I proposed a feature about Shenzhen; the editors agreed. At last, I gave up the clipping, and after that year’s World Economic Forum—another three hundred bucks a day—I swore that I was finished with brochures and propaganda. I was determined to write journalism full time, and I wanted legal status.
It was easier to get licensed with a newspaper than with a magazine, and that was one reason why I came to an arrangement with the Boston Globe. They wanted a Beijing stringer; there wasn’t any salary or even a stipend, but the newspaper would sponsor my accreditation, as long as I arranged the necessary materials. The Chinese Foreign Ministry required endless documents: résumé, biography, business license, letter of introduction, certification of professional qualifications:
This document certifies that Peter Hessler is a fully-qualified journalist whose experience is commensurate with the demands of working as a foreign correspondent…
I wrote everything myself. Ian showed me old applications that had been used by the Wall Street Journal, and then I created my own versions, sending them off to Boston to be signed by the editors. Language mattered—everything should be formal. And it was important to include details; I needed to create an official life that, even if it had no basis in reality, could be produced on paper if there were a problem. I claimed that I had spent the past year living in Hong Kong and the United States. In Beijing, I established an imaginary Boston Globe bureau at the Journal’s address; Ian signed the forms and stamped them with an official chop. At the police station, I registered as a resident of a diplomatic compound where I had no intention of ever spending a single night.
In my biographical documents, I created a portrait of a journalist who combined remarkable qualifications with stunning naiveté. He held two university degrees, and he had a strong background in teaching and writing. He had pursued China studies without taking the slightest interest in politics, religion, or human rights. He cared nothing about Xinjiang or Tibet. He liked business stories. He was bright, but not so bright that he couldn’t be dazzled by Reform and Opening:
Dear Press Attaché,
For the past twenty years, China’s economic reforms have resulted in dramatic changes, ranging from vast improvements in living standards to new contacts with foreign countries. With China’s growing economic importance reflected by its coming accession to the World Trade Organization, the rest of the world can’t afford to miss the story of today’s China. As one of America’s oldest and largest daily newspapers, the Boston Globe believes that covering China is critical to our international perspective….
BY MAY, THE black-market exchange rate had fallen to 8.6 yuan to the dollar. In the afternoons, Polat was rarely busy, and we spent hours on the outdoor platform of the Uighur restaurant. They no longer kept beer in the manhole; the owner had finally acquired a refrigerator. That was another dramatic change that had resulted from China’s economic reforms, but the truth was that I already missed the old days. In Beijing, sentimentality was often just a year away.
One day, a group of men from the North Korean embassy stopped at the restaurant for lunch. Polat was eating with some Uighur friends, and they watched the North Koreans for a while. Finally, Polat stood up and walked over to the other table.
“I like that pin,” he said, pointing to an image of Kim Il Sung on one of the men’s lapels. “I’ll give you one American dollar for it.”
The North Korean ignored him. Polat said, “Two American dollars.”
The North Koreans stood up and left without finishing their noodles. We never saw them in the Uighur restaurant again.
THAT SUMMER, POLAT purchased a new identity. One day, while visiting some clothing markets near the American embassy, he met a Chinese man who introduced himself as a “visa consultant.” They struck up a conversation, and the man gave Polat his business card:
Cultural Exchange Company, Ltd.
Polat visited the office, which was near Yabaolu. For eighty-eight hundred dollars, the man offered to arrange everything—paperwork, visa application, plane ticket. Polat returned a few times, to make sure that he could trust the company, and then he finally agreed.
The first step involved creating a believable story. The man studied Polat’s passport, jotting down all previous international trips, and then he created a parallel identity that matched up perfectly. He decided that Polat should have an advanced degree from a Chinese university, and he should be involved in high-level trade with companies around the world. Most important, he should be rich.
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