VJUST AFTER THE STREETS of Tunisia and

Egypt erupted, China saw a series of "Jasmine"protests—until the government stopped them cold.Its methods were subtler than they had beenat Tiananmen Square, and more insidious.Was the regime's defensive reaction just paranoia?Or is the Chinese public less satisfied-^and more combustible—than it appears? /

By JAMES FALLOWS OMETHiNG BIG IS happening in China, andit started soon after tbe onset of tbe "ArabSpring" demonstrations and regime changesfirst in Tunisia and then in Egypt: tbe mostserious and widespread wave of repressionsince the Tiananmen Square crackdowns22 years ago. Of course, "worst since Tianan-

men Square" does not mean "as bad as Tiananmen Square."As tbe government has taken pains to ensure, tbere have beenno coordinated nationwide protests so far, and troops fromthe People's Liberation Army, in tbeir instantly recognizable ïgreen uniforms, have not played tbe major role that tbey did f'then in containing dissent. Instead, enforcement around the Î;country has been left mainly to regular police, typically in ïtbeir dark-blue uniforms; tbe much-feared "urban manage- îment" patrols known as chengguan, also in dark blue; large re- Sserve armies of plainclothesmen; and many other less visible S

s o SEPTEMBER 2011 THE ATLANTIC

parts of the state's internal-security apparatus, which nowhas a larger budget tban Cbina's regular military does.

Unlike in 1989, for most people in most of the country,life and business since tbe beginning of the Arab Springbave bummed along relatively normally. The main domesticconcerns in China at the moment are rapid infla- ^ _ ^ _tion, especially in food prices; a severe long-termnationwide drougbt (broken by occasional severelocalized flooding), which bas tbreatened farmsin tbe country's normally wet soutbern provincesand brought Dust Bowl conditions to parts of thenormally dry north; and widening scandals andpublic fear about tainted food supplies. In May, areport based on figures from the Cbinese Ministry of Healtbshowed tbat cancer bad become tbe country's leading causeof death, wbich is an unusual and revealing distinction. Inpoorer countries, infectious diseases are usually the main

MOREONUNEJames Fallowsand Damien Maforecast China'spolitical weather:theatlantic.com/chinesewinter.•[ HEATLANTIC.COM

killers; in richer ones, heart disease and other consequencesof a sedentary, wealthy lifestyle. The rising prevalence of can-cer, including in "cancer villages" near factories or mines inChina's still-poor countryside, was taken even by Cbinesecommentators as anotber indication of tbe urgency of deal-

ing witb the environmental consequences of thecountry's nonstop growth. For modern Cbina,tbougb, all of tbese are familiar concerns.

A set of less familiar problems developed witbamazing speed early in the year. In mid-January,Hu Jintao met Barack Obama in Wasbington, onwbat would be Hu's last official visit to tbe UnitedStates. In a little more tban a year, Hu will finish

bis second five-year term as president and relinquisb thejob, presumably to anointee/Vice President Xi Jinping. Tbemeetings in Wasbington were as constructive and positive-toned as sucb events can be. Obama gave Hu tbe gala White

THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2011 SI

House state dinner (wbicb my wife and I attended) that hebad notably not received on bis previous American visit: fiveyears earlier, George W. Bush bad offered Hu only a luncb attbe White House, an omission tbe more startling given tbestandard Chinese practice of building even tbe most trivialbusiness meeting around a celebratory banquet. Officialsfrom both sides noted tbeir areas of political and econom-ic disagreement (arms sales to Taiwan, status of the DalaiLama, etc.) but also signed numerous cooperative agree-ments, in fields ranging from clean-energy research to stu-dent excbanges and increased military interactions. Presi-dent Ben Ali had been forced from power in Tunisia just daysbefore Hu Jintao traveled to Wasbington. The Tahrir Squareprotests against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt began just after Hureturned to Beijing, and were soon followed by the uprisingsin Jordan, Yemen, Syria, and Libya. Tbe spread of protestfrom one Arab-Islamic country to its neighbors migbt baveseemed predictable. Less so was tbe effect in Cbina.

On Sunday afrernoon, February 20, wbile Muammar Qad-dafi's troops were sbooting into unarmed crowds in Ben-gbazi, a handful of Chinese staged the first of a projectedseries of weekly "Jasmine" protests designed to extend tbespirit of tbe Arab Spring protests to several major Chinesecities. Tbe demonstration in Beijing was held in front of aMcDonald's restaurant at tbe Wangfujing intersection, notfar from tbe Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. Thatday, several dozen demonstrators were matcbed by abouttbe same number of foreign reporters, plus large numbers ofpassersby and onlookers (Wangfujingon a weekend is one ofBeijing's most jammed areas) and larger groups of uniformedand plainclothes police.

Among tbe onlookers was Jon Huntsman Jr. with bis fam-ily. Huntsman, then in his last weeks as tbe U.S. ambassadorto China before returning to run for tbe presidency, lookedlike a Chinese pop-culture caricature of a cool-cat American.He was wearing sunglasses—tbe day was cold but brilliantlyclear—and a Top Gun-style brown-leatber aviator jacketwith a big American-flag patch on tbe left shoulder. He hadbecome a well-known figure in Beijing, from bis bike ridesaround town and bis command of spoken Mandarin, and bewas quickly picked out by Chinese in tbe crowd and capturedon camera phones in photos and a video that soon spreadacross tbe Internet.

Even though Huntsman maintained that he'd been out ona family stroll and happened by tbe protest inadvertently, noone in Cbina believed tbat, and the video of bim witb twostrapping sons, misidentified as bodyguards, quickly circu-lated in China as proof tbat the United States was engineer-ing tbe protests. I don't know wbetber Huntsman's presencewas an accident. I do know that baving America's seniorrepresentative on tbe scene was damaging, given the byper-sensitivity of tbe Chinese government and many citizens totbe merest bint of foreign meddling in domestic affairs. (Onthe most-circulated video, a Chinese man yells at Huntsman,

"You want cbaos for Cbina, don't you?") It also illustratedtbe awkwardness of Huntsman's staying on as ambassadorto America's most important partner/rival country wbilepublicly contemplating a run against the president wbo badappointed bim.

Within two days, the street outside the Wangfujing Mc-Donald's bad been almost entirely blocked by out-of-nowhere

"street repair" construction boardings. Tbe following Sunday,when the next Jasmine marcb was supposed to take place,almost no demonstrators appeared in Wangfujing. Insteadtbere were large numbers of foreign reporters and tourists,and countless hundreds of security forces. Jasmine demon-strators in Sbangbai mustered a larger showing tbat day, butthat turned out to be a bigh-water mark. By late February,tbe Jasmine "movement" was on its way to being decisivelyshut down.

Y WIFE AND I were in China, mainly Beijing,througb February and March, so we bad achance to see bow this movement tentativelybuilt itself and was tben quelled, at least fora while. One of tbe realities bardest to con-

vey about modern Cbina (and Atlantic readers know that Icertainly have tried over tbe years) is bow life tbere can besimultaneously so wide-open and so tightly controlled. Inmost of tbe country and for most people's pursuits, tbis Chi-nese Winter that followed an Arab Spring left life lookingnormal. Tbe economy kept growing; farmers worried abouttbeir crops and students about their tests; engineers designednew high-speed rail lines. I was in China mainly to report ontbe country's big bigb-tecb ambitions, and there was abso-lutely notbing about my interviews or factory visits tbat wasnot business as usual.

Yet for tbose in Cbina wbo defined tbeir business as in-volving politics of any sort, tbe pressure was intense. First,in February, a large number of tbe country's bunian-rigbtsand public-interest lawyers (yes, tbey exist) were arrestedor detained, or were disappeared, in the style of Pinochet'sChile. Once they were gone, people tbey migbt have repre-sented and defended—writers, professors, bloggers, activistsof many sorts—were arrested or made to disappear too. TbeNobel Committee expressed concern not just that the mostrecent recipient of the Peace Prize, tbe civil-rights activistLiu Xiaobo, was still imprisoned but tbat tbey bad not beardanytbing from bim for montbs. "Signs of tightening controlhave been visible for several years," Josbua Rosenzweig, abuman-rigbts official in Hong Kong, wrote in Marcb. "Butthe authorities are now employing a range of new, illegalmethods to silence tbeir critics ... Most terrifying of all is theway in wbich enforced disappearance appears to have be-come almost routine."

Apart from Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese activist best knownaround the world is tbe artist Ai Weiwei. Inside Cbina hebad, among other causes, sougbt investigations into tbe laxbuilding standards that led to thousands of schoolcbildren'sdeaths in tbe Sicbuan eartbquake of 2008. On April 3 of tbisyear, as be was about to board a plane in Beijing for HongKong, be was detained too. Eventually be was cbarged witbtax evasion, and remained in legal jeopardy even afrer hisrelease in June. "If tbe authorities can detain a figure of suchstature arbitrarily and bold him incommunicado as long astbey want witb no access to family or legal counsel, tben noone in China is safe from tbe whims and anxieties of tbose inpower," Wei Jingsheng, who himself had served 15 years in

52 SEPTEMBER 2011 THE ATLANTIC

prison for political crimes before being released to the Unit-ed States in the 1990s, wrote in the Christian Science Monitorafter the arrest.

I realize that a chronicle of such cases becomes tedious,especially with unfamiliar names. But every day, new namesappeared—on foreign news sites, not in the Chinese press-along with other illustrations of a society politically closingup and cracking down. Conferences with international at-tendees were canceled at the last minute. So too, with oneday's notice, was a prestigious annual debate tournament,among teams from 16 leading Chinese universities. The topic,a reconsideration of the ideals set out for China a centuryago in the revolution that overthrew the last Qing emperor, in1911, was deemed too sensitive. Foreign journalists were oneby one called in "for tea," code for a cautionary talk with se-curity officials. Usually the officials warned that the journal-ists would be expelled if they violated "rules"—some newlyimposed, some long on the books but notenforced—requiring advance official permis-sion before interviewing Chinese citizens.

Churchmeetings were disrupted. Membersof "sensitive" ethnic groups—Tibetans, Mus-lim Uighurs, Inner Mongolians, all of whosehome districts had been scenes of ongoingprotest—came in for special scrutiny. Oneday in March, major boulevards in Beijingsuddenly were lined with older women,bundled up in overcoats and with red arm-bands identifying them as public-safety pa-trols, who sat on stools at 20-yard intervalsand kept watch for disruption. They bad nopractical effect except as reminders that tbeauthorities were on guard and in control.

During the earliest stages of the ArabSpring, the mainstream Chinese media virtually ignored itsexistence. Then, as the drama in Egypt became un-ignorable,coverage in China emphasized the dangerous chaos and ex-cesses. Then the theme became: whether or not such upheav-al made sense for anyone else, it was the wrong way for Chinaand would jeopardize the country's hard-won gains. GlobalTimes, a nationalist paper, said of Western protests aboutAi Weiwei's arrest: "The West's behavior aims at disruptingthe attention of Chinese society and attempts to modify thevalue system of the Chinese people."

In a way, the most surprising and thoroughgoing change inChinese daily life was in access to the Internet. As I wrote inthese pages three years ago ("The Connection Has Been Re-set," March 2008), the genius of China's Internet censorshiphas been its flexible repression. The filtering system knownofficially as Golden Shield and unofficially as the Great Fire-wall made finding unauthorized material just difficult enoughthat the great majority of Chinese citizens wouldn't bother.Meanwhile, enough loopholes and pressure valves remainedopen that people who really cared about escaping its confinesalways could. A very significant loophole took the form of thegovernment's blind eye toward VPNs—"Virtual Private Net-works," which gave anyone willing to spend a dollar or two aweek safe passage through the Great Firewall. You signed upfor a VPN service, you made your connection, and from that

One dayboulevards inBeijing werelined withwomen with redarmhands, w hosat on stools at20-yard intervalsand kept w^atchfor disruptions.

point on you prowled the Internet just as if you were loggedon from London or New York.

People who could afford VPNs, including most foreignersand many in the Chinese elite, could view Internet censor-ship as a problem for the country but not personally for them.And most people assumed that this loophole would alwaysstay open—how could universities or corporations do busi-ness otherwise? Even the man known in China as the fatherof the Great Firewall, a computer scientist (and universitypresident!) named Fang Binxing, made waves in February bytelling a leading Chinese newspaper that he kept six VPNsrunning on his computers at home.

That report was soon pulled from tbe paper's Web site—and at about that same time, serious disruption of VPN activ-ity began. For a while I thought something was wrong withmy computer. I'd try to get my e-mail, or to go to a foreignnews site—and after a few minutes of waiting, I would realize

that the connection was simply not ever go-ing to get through. Part of the Great Firewall'spower is that you don't see a message saying

"access denied." Things just... don't work, andyou can't be sure why. But officials from VPNcompanies said they were being targeted, ina way they'd never experienced before. "TheKlingon Empire scored a couple of solid hitson the USS Enterprise," the CEO of one of theleading VPNs, Witopia, wrote to his custom-ers in March (along with discreet tips on newports and connections to try).

The VPN disruption seemed worst onweekends and was sometimes an absoluteblackout for hours on end. My own theory,which no one I interviewed could disprove,was that this was a proof of concept for the

security agencies—a demonstration that they could cut offchannels to the outside world immediately, if the need arose.But even when the system was turned back on, the Inter-net in much of China was hobbled. If you have spent time inSouth Korea, Japan, or Singapore, you know that broadbandsystems there make the typical U.S. "high-speed" connectionseem pokey. But China's Internet controls can seem like a re-turn to the days of 1,200-baud dial-up access. After each Webclick, it could take five, 10, 30 seconds for a page to appear.

"Anyone bullish about China should come and try to use tbeinternet here," an American graduate student named MattSchiavenza wrote in a frustrated tweet this year. (Twitter, likeFacebook and Blogger and many Google services, is unusablein China without a VPN.) Or, as tbe head of a foreign techcompany wrote to me in an e-mail early this year, "Ultimately,if they want to take the country's internet connections 'ThirdWorld,' none of us can prevent that."

After the Japanese earthquake in March, Bill Powell, awriter for Time who had gone to Fukushima from his basein Shanghai, told me about a site, AllThingsNuclear.org,whose information he considered most reliable and up-to-date. When Powell returned to China, he found that this sitetoo was blocked by the Great Firewall. "What are they afraidof?" he wrote in a Web posting. "Or is the answer simply thatthese days, they are afraid of EVERYTHING?"

THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2011 53

c A ^ ' FI? Y Hole by Wa//íer Pickering

HAT THE CENTRAL Chinese leadershipmight be afraid of, and why, is the centralpolitical question about China now. Thehair-trigger defensiveness of the govern-ment's response resembles that of a totter-

ing Arab Spring regime, while overall the nation's prospectscould not seem more different from, say, Egypt's. Economi-cally, countries throughout the North Africa/Middle Eastcrescent have been stagnant. China, as you might have heard,has been an economic success. Qaddafi, Mubarak, Ben Ali,and others have governed as if they had a lifetime hold onpower. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao were not elected by thepublic, but they will give up power after two terms.

Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and the like have discontentedreserve armies of unemployed young men. Because of itsone-child policy, China has, if anything, a shortage of youngwomen and men, relative to the retirees they will have to sup-port. This March, as the Chinese crackdown intensified, thePew Global Attitudes Project released the results of surveysthe previous year in China and Egypt, among other places.The contrast was stark. Twenty-eight percent of Egyptianswere "satisfied" with their country's direction, down from47 percent a few years earlier; 87 percent of Chinese weresatisfied, up from 83 percent. Only 23 percent of Egyptianswere optimistic about their own life prospects over the nextfive years, versus 74 percent of Chinese (and 52 percent ofAmericans). Surveys in China can be suspect, and Pew notes

in the fine print that its Chinese surveysample was "disproportionately urban,"under-weighting China's rural poor.Still, the general impression that mostpeople in China buy into the prevailingsystem rings true.

Why, then, has the governmentreacted as if the country were on thebrink of revolt? Do the Chinese authori-ties know something about their coun-try's realities that groups like Pew havemissed, and therefore understand thatthey are hanging by a thread? Or, out ofreflex and paranoia, are they respondingfar more harshly than circumstances re-ally require, in ways that could backfirein the long run?

While in China and afterward, Iasked everyone I could: Is the govern-ment eerily perceptive, or destructivelyobtuse? There's no proof on either side,but here are the arguments for eachview.

Those who think the governmenthas good reason to be worried say thatthe accumulated tensions—political,economic, environmental, and social—of China's all-out growth have reachedan unbearable extreme. By this inter-pretation, the seeming satisfactionof the Chinese public is a veneer thatcould easily crack. "If one were to read

only the Party-controlled media, one might get the impres-sion that China is prosperous, stable, and headed for an ageof 'great peace and prosperity,' " Liu Xiaobo himself wrote,in an essay shortly before he was arrested. (The English ver-sion, translated by Perry Link of Princeton, will appear thisfall in a collection of Liu's essays and poems. No Enemies, NoHatred.) He continued:

Not only from the Internet, but from foreign news sources aswell as the internal documents of the regime itself—its 'crisisreports'—we know that more and more major conflicts, of-ten involving violence and bloodshed, have been breaking outbetween citizens and officials all across China. The countryrests at the brink of a volcano.

By June of this year, a wave of bombings, riots, and vio-lent protests at widely dispersed sites across the countryillustrated what Liu was warning about. The trigger of theuprisings varied city by city—ethnic tensions in some areas,beatings by police or chengguan in others—but they addedto a mood of nationwide tension. "With rampant official cor-ruption, inflation, economic disparity, and all sorts of socialinjustice and political tensions, the threat to the CCP rule isvery much real," Cheng Li, who grew up in Shanghai and isnow a specialist in Chinese politics at the Brookings Institu-tion, told me this summer.

Five years ago, in his book China's Trapped Transition,Minxin Pei argued that China would be hitting a limit of its

56 SEPTEMBER 2011 THE ATLANTIC

current economic growth scheme in about seven years' time,or about now. Pei, wbo is also originally from Shanghai and isnow at Claremont McKenna College, in California, said thatChina's state-led development model would work wonder-fully—up to a point. Tbe same traits that made the country amiracle of the infrastructure-and-cheap-exports era wouldhandicap it, he said, when it had to compete in higher-valueindustries and jobs, as it is now trying to do.

"If you were sitting in Hu Jintao's office, you would seetbe protests, tbe ethnic tensions," be told me recently, "andyou might tbink, 'If we are not tough enough, things couldquickly get out of control' " From tbe cen-tral authorities' point of view, according toPei, tbere is one clear lesson of TiananmenSquare: "They have learned from past experi-ence in 1989 tbat you have to be very tough attbe beginning, to nip things in the bud. It ismuch better to have overkill than underkill."

I beard similar sentiments from peoplenow working in China, Cbinese and foreignalike. For instance, a well-known economistin China, who asked not to be named, saidthat the government was worried preciselybecause it understood tbe difficulties of theeconomic adjustments ahead. "Tbere is in-creasing awareness of bow out-of-control thegrowth model has become, and it will requirea sharp adjustment involving a growth slowdown," tbis per-son said. "Tbe more aware tbe leaders are of the strains in theeconomy, the more worried they are about the difficulty oftbe adjustment"—mainly through layoffs, bankruptcies, andother economic shocks.

If, months or years firom now, tbe volcano should explodeand tbe veneer of control should crack, it will be easy to findevidence tbat tbis was inevitable all along. When I asked anacademic at one of China's leading universities how he wouldexplain the government's harshness, he wrote in an e-mailthat the level of public discontent was extreme:

It is hard to get anyone in Beijing under the age of 30 to indi-cate anything but contempt for the government, and I suspectthis is true in a lot of other cities. There really is a sense amongyoung people and college students that everyone is grabbingeverything they can, and it is noteworthy that princelings[children of senior party leaders] no longer want to be invest-ment bankers hut rather want to be private equity investors.In other words, getting paid millions for your connectionsisn't interesting anymore. Owning the whole lot is better.

Premier Wen Jiabao is seen as tbe big-hearted "grandpa" ofChina, always the first to visit disaster scenes. His son, Win-ston Wen, has an M.B.A. from Northwestern and has workedin private equity.

The other view is tbat tbe situation in China is indeedtense—but that it has always been tense, and that so manypeople have so much to lose from any radical change, that tbecountry's own buffering forces would contain a disruptioneven if tbe government weren't cracking down so bard.

The main reason is tbat for all tbe complaints and dissat-isfactions witb today's Communist rule, there is no visible

are theyafraid of?" onejournalist wrote."Or is the answersimply that thesedays, they areafraid ofEVERYTHING?"

alternative—in part, of course, because the government hasworked so hard to keep such alternatives from emerging. Thisis a less satisfying side of the argument to advance. You lookworse if you turn out to be wrong, and it seems unimaginativeto say that an uneasy status quo migbt go on indefinitely. Still,it is what I would guess if forced to choose.

I asked Chas Freeman what he made of China's current tur-moil. He is a former diplomat wbo served as Richard Nixon'sinterpreter during his visit to China in 1972. Because Freemanwas working during tbe discussions between Nixon and ZhouEnlai, be knows that one of the most famous stories about

Zhou is not true. Half the commencementspeakers in America have quoted Zhou'salleged response when asked whether tbeFrench Revolution bad been a success: "Toosoon to tell." Ah, those far-seeing Chinese!In fact. Freeman points out, Zhou was nottalking about tbe French Revolution of 1789.He was talking about the upheavals tbatbegan in France in 1968 and bad not fullysimmered down by tbe time be and Nixontalked.

When it came to contemporary China,Freeman said tbat be takes seriously tbecomplaints about economic inequality, eth-nic tension, and other potential sources ofinstability. But, he said, they remind bim of

conversations he had wben living in Taiwan in the 1970s, be-fore Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang party had moved lromquasi-military rule to open elections. "People would say tbeyare corrupt, tbey have no vision, tbey have a ridiculous ideol-ogy we bave to kowtow to, but tbat no one believes in prac-tice," be told me. "And I would say, 'If they're so bad, whydon't you get rid of tbem?' That would be greeted witb ab-solute incredulity." Taiwanese oftbat era would tell him that,corrupt or not, the party was steadily bringing prosperity. Orthat there was no point in complaining, since the party wouldeliminate anyone wbo challenged its rule. Tbe parallel witbmainland China was obvious. A generation later, Taiwan hadbecome democratized.

Conceivably, tbat is what anotber generation might meanfor tbe mainland—especially if tbe next wave of rulers areless hair-trigger about security, and more concerned abouttbe lobotomizing effects on tbeir society of, for instance,making it so bard to use tbe Internet. Whicb in turn is partof a climate that keeps their universities from becomingmagnets for tbe world's talent, which in turn puts a dragon China's attempts to foster the Apples, Googles, GEs ofthe future. We don't know, but we can guess tbat whateverChina's situation is, a generation from now, we will be ableto look back and find signs tbat it was fated all along. "Peoplepredicted the fall of tbe Cbinese Communist Party in 1989,and it didn't happen," Perry Link told me. "People did notpredict tbe fall of tbe Soviet Union in 1991, and it did happen.I'm sure tbat whatever happens in China, or doesn't, we willbe able to look back and say wby." If only it were possible todo tbat now. El

James Fallows is an Atlantic national correspondent; his blog is atjamesfallows.theatlantic.com.

58 SEPTEMBER 2011 THE ATLANTIC

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