In the summer of 2009, the Chinese edition of Esquire ran a soft, glittery feature called “Chinese Dream.” It asked sixty prominent people of one kind or another—actors, editors, public intellectuals—to explain their hopes for the future. One of them, wearing a high-fashion French-cuff shirt and a skinny tie (and bearing the self-conscious expression of a normal person who has been gussied up for a magazine shoot), was a local legislator and lawyer in his mid-thirties named Xu Zhiyong.
At the time, Xu was known for his work as a legal activist, one who had made the rare choice to push for reform not from outside the system but from deep within it—he ran for, and won, a seat on a local district assembly in Beijing. In his work as a lawyer, he had been honored by the government for investigating contaminated baby formula and helping people who had been locked up by local governments in unofficial jails. In 2002, state television named him one of the “Top Ten Figures in the Rule of Law.” Xu projected a nearly evangelical sense of civic consciousness. In 2007, Susan Jakes, then a reporter for Time , wrote of him, “Xu is probably the person most committed to public service that I’ve met in China, and possibly in my whole life.” It was the kind of story that the Chinese press likes to promote now and then as evidence of the country’s capacity for pluralism within the wider confines of Party rule. “I have taken part in politics in pursuit of a better and more civilized nation,” The Economic Observer, a Beijing-based weekly, quoted him as saying. “I am determined to prove to the citizens across the country that politics should be desirable.” In the Esquire piece, he explained his Chinese dream:
A little more than four years later, the fate of Xu Zhiyong is a stark measure of change in China’s political culture. On Wednesday, Xu will go to court, in Beijing, where prosecutors are preparing to try him on the charge of “gathering a crowd to disrupt public order.” He is accused of organizing small-scale protests against corruption and in support of migrant parents who are seeking to enroll their children in city schools. Xu faces up to five years in prison. Nobody doubts that he will be convicted.
In the years since his photo shoot, Xu has, in effect, tried to make good on the Chinese dream that he defined for himself: he attracted a big following on social media, posting information and debating with others on Weibo, China’s Twitter, as it expanded in scale and influence. Inspired by the new possibilities of the Web and the rise of a younger generation of Communist Party leaders, in May, 2012, Xu and others formed what they called the New Citizens Movement, to call for transparency and a crackdown on official corruption. They attracted up to five thousand supporters—a thimbleful in a country of China’s size, but a significant campaign in the context of a one-party state.
But that fall, Xi Jinping took office as President, and embarked on what has proved to be a fundamental effort to restore the Party’s control over the ideological and political apparatus. Xi embraced the idea of the Chinese dream as the centerpiece of his ideological agenda, seeking to define it as a grand collective objective to renew the nation both at home and abroad, to purify its political culture, and to broaden its influence abroad. To tame the unruly power of the Web, the Supreme People’s Court declared that “false defamatory” comments, viewed five thousand times or forwarded five hundred times, could result in a prison sentence of up to three years. In a speech, Lu Wei, the director of the State Internet Information Office, declared that “freedom without order does not exist.”
Xu and his colleagues did not fit into that definition of the Chinese dream. He was arrested this past July, and since then an estimated hundred and sixty other activists have been detained in connection with the government’s campaign to rein in grassroots political efforts. Under the new restrictions, Weibo, once so vibrant, has been sapped of a good deal of its energy. On Thursday, it reported that it lost nine per cent of its users last year—it now has two hundred eighty-one million—the first drop since it launched, four years ago, in the same heady summer that Xu appeared in Esquire.
There are many ironies embedded in this moment: Xi has made it clear that he believes his success, and the future of the Party, hinges on the Party’s ability to beat back corruption and restore the faith of his people, yet his administration is putting some of the country’s most zealous opponents of corruption on trial. The President has said that innovation and disruptive thinking will be vital to propelling China from a manufacturing-based economy to a new, more creative era, and to sustaining its economic engine, yet his government is working to curb the most dynamic realm of its new digital culture.
The explanation for these paradoxes is not mysterious: the President is betting that he can rally the loyalty of his people around the official version of the Chinese dream and tamp down a discordant chorus of alternatives. He may succeed. But the prosecution of Xu Zhiyong and his Chinese dream is a reminder that the desire to imagine a different future for the country existed before, and it is likely to return when it has the chance.
Photograph by Greg Baker/AP.
