Of course, skill only went so far. Li would never have become a minister if the others on the Standing Committee had doubted his loyalty. But they didn’t. To them, Li was the ultimate soldier, always following orders. In truth, as long as Li mouthed the right words, the Party’s leaders didn’t care if he believed in “socialism with a human face.” They certainly didn’t. Being rich and powerful in China meant being part of the Party. So the Party’s leaders faithfully recited the “Eight Dos and Don‘ts”—“Know plain living and hard struggle, do not wallow in luxuries”—and then rode limousines home to their mansions. The sayings were the equivalent of a fraternity’s secret handshake. By themselves, they meant nothing. But knowing them got you in.
LI PREFERRED TO BE UNDERESTIMATED. Even when he joined the Standing Committee, the others didn’t view him as a political threat. After all, he hadn’t even succeeded in getting rich from his position. Besides “Old Bull,” the liberals — those members of the elite who had profited the most from the new China — had another name for Li. They called him “Guard Dog,” though never to his face.
But the liberals misunderstood Li. He was greed ier than any of them, though not for money. Li wanted to prove himself the greatest of leaders, the savior of the Chinese nation, remembered eternally for his courage. In his dreams, he lay beside Mao in the massive crypt in Tiananmen Square. Every day thousands of Chinese lined up to glimpse his body. They shuffled by in awe, wishing they could bring him back. The lines grew until the crowds filled Tiananmen and poured into the streets of Beijing. But the people were so eager to see him that no one complained.
When he woke, Li never remembered his dreams. He never consciously realized how deeply he thirsted for glory. He didn’t understand his motives, and that made him dangerous indeed.
SITTING IN HIS USUAL SPOT, two seats from the head of the table, Li lifted his crystal wineglass and studied the burgundy liquid inside. A Château Lafitte ‘92, 10,000 yuan a bottle, $1,300 US. The men around him had gone through a half-case of the stuff tonight. They surely believed they’d earned it.
In May 1989, hundreds of thousands of students had filled Tiananmen — the great open square less than a mile from here, the spiritual heart of all China — to demand democracy. The Western reporters who covered the protests called that time the Beijing Spring. For a few weeks it seemed that China might move from dictatorship to freedom. After all, on the other side of the world, Communist regimes were falling peacefully.
But China wasn’t East Germany or Poland. China had gone through a century of upheaval so terrible that even World War II seemed mild. An invasion by Japan. A long, bloody civil war. The disastrous Great Leap Forward, which led to a famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese. The Cultural Revolution. The Chinese weren’t ready for more turmoil, not so soon. They hardly protested on June 4, 1989, when the men of Zhongnanhai brought in tanks to clear Tiananmen. Hundreds of protesters were killed that day in Beijing. The People’s Liberation Army? On June 4, only the last word was true.
The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party never admitted what they’d done in Tiananmen. Instead they offered their people an unspoken bargain. Don’t challenge us. In return we’ll let you drop the farce of socialism. “To get rich is glorious,” Deng Xiaoping, at the time China’s paramount leader, famously said. “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.” Some people said now that those words had never actually crossed Deng’s lips. But the sentiment was real enough.
For two decades, rulers and ruled had stuck to the deal, and China had produced the greatest economic miracle in history. In the 1980s, China was a third-world country, poorer than India. Now it had the third-largest economy in the world, behind only the United States and Japan.
And yet. and yet. Under its glittery surface China’s economy had reached a dangerous tipping point, Li thought. The boom had given hundreds of millions of Chinese a decent standard of living. But it had left hundreds of millions more in the dust.
Li sipped his wine, the smoothest he’d ever tasted—10,000 yuan a bottle. His father Hu had worked at a tire factory until his heart gave out on his fifty-second birthday. Hu hadn’t made 10,000 yuan in his entire life. He’d never owned a television or refrigerator or even a telephone. He’d saved for years to buy his most prized possession, a Flying Pigeon bicycle, a single-geared steel beast that weighed almost fifty pounds.
Yet Li never remembered his parents complaining. They’d never felt poor, since no one they knew was any better off. And they hardly needed money. The tire factory gave them a two-room apartment with a communal bathroom. They didn’t have much, but their lives were secure. They never had to worry that Hu would be fired or the factory would close. Such things simply didn’t happen.
Now, though, factories closed all the time. Real estate developers tore down the cluttered Beijing neighborhoods called hutongs, to build apartment buildings across the giant city. The apartment towers were cleaner than the hutongs. But the hutong families didn’t get to live in the new buildings. They were shipped to hovels on the outskirts of the city, beyond the Fifth Ring Road, where the capital’s wealthy wouldn’t see them.
Today, men like Li’s father knew they were poor. They couldn’t imagine the opulence of this room, or the private clubs in Beijing where the wealthy gathered. But they knew China had left them behind. Fewer and fewer of them were willing to accept their fate. All over China the pot was boiling up. In southwest China, farmers had attacked police stations over land seizures. In north China, coal miners had rioted to demand safety equipment after an explosion at a mine in Hebei killed 180 men.
Even worse, the economy wasn’t booming anymore. So far, the government had hidden the slowdown from the outside world. But Li knew the real numbers. Growth had slowed month after month, from ten percent to eight to five and now to three. And no one, not the economic minister or the governor of the Central Bank, could explain what was happening, not in words that made sense to Li. They said the economy needed more reform, not less.
But Li spent more time outside Zhongnanhai than the other senior leaders combined. He might not be an economist, but he had eyes. He saw old women with bowed heads begging for help, their clothes dirty, empty bowls between their hands. He saw the peasants lined up in Tiananmen to plead for work, even though the police beat them just for being there.
The poet Du Fu had written, 1,250 years earlier, “Within red gates, wine and meat rot, while on the street outside people starve.” Dynasties crumbled when emperors forgot their subjects. Inside Zhongnanhai, life was sweeter than ever. The men around him imagined they could call in the tanks again if they needed to. But this time the rebels wouldn’t be students. They would be miners and peasants and factory workers. They would be men, not boys, and this time they would fight.
Li wouldn’t let that happen. He wouldn’t use the People’s Liberation Army, his army, against civilians. He would take control of the situation, not for his own glory, of course, but to save the nation from the greed of its rulers.