Mao to Now

IV. The East Is Red
My father always amazed me with his evolving views on China. He was 80 and recovering from heart surgery in early 1997 when I mentioned that I'd be in Hong Kong on July 1 to cover the British crown colony's historic reversion to Chinese sovereignty. He immediately announced, "I'm going, too!" The plan sounded insane. The flight would be 18 hours, and why would he celebrate the handover? He'd never had any use for the communists in Beijing. But he insisted, saying he just wanted to be there—"one of only a few million Chinese to see the moment." He was eager for China to get back the land taken from the spineless Manchu dynasty more than half a century before Mao took power. "As a kid, I had the history of the Opium Wars drummed into me," he said. "It was the biggest humiliation in history. We hated the British for that." And for what came after. He recalled seeing burly cops—turbaned Sikhs from British India—beating Chinese beggars and prostitutes in Shanghai's International Concession in the 1930s.

Papa came to Hong Kong to watch the handover ceremonies in the company of old friends. I remember Prince Charles delivering a stiff-lipped farewell speech while a summer downpour dripped from his cheeks and chin. One flaglowering event featured a team of three motley Brits, mismatched in height and gait, and each in a different outfit. One wore a kilt. They made a sad contrast to China's towering honor guards, perfectly synchronized in their movements and wearing impeccably tailored uniforms. A PLA soldier unfurled a gigantic Chinese national flag with a single fluid motion and a snap so loud and clear you could practically feel it. A burst of pride and vindication swept through millions of Chinese—my father included.

China's rulers needed Hong Kong, and not just for its money-spinning stock exchange. With little trace of communism remaining beyond the name of their monolithic party, they had to find another "ism" to justify their continued hold on power. The answer: nationalism. Party leaders recast themselves as the country's great defenders, who would avenge past injuries and restore national pride. Hong Kong was only the first step. Macau would soon follow. And the big prize would be Taiwan. America, the policeman of the Pacific, watched nervously. A year earlier Beijing had staged a massive missile-firing exercise in the Taiwan Strait, attempting to tilt the island's presidential vote. Now the Chinese Navy was vigorously asserting claims to specks of sand and coral in the South China Sea. At times the territorial grabs seemed laughable, like the giant raft of mainland topsoil they anchored at a spot called Mischief Reef. The Chinese planted a floating vegetable garden on it under a sign declaring LONG LIVE THE MOTHERLAND. Still, Washington couldn't help wondering if a new cold war was brewing.

The party's new rallying cry was a resounding hit with the Chinese people. When I returned to Beijing in 1998 for another tour of duty at the bureau, I got to know China's first teenage female punk-rock group, Hang on the Box. With her spiky red hair and studded dog collar, 19-year-old singer-guitarist Wang Yue was a chain-smoking, foulmouthed rebel. But she didn't have a bad word to say about Tiananmen. "The Army did the right thing," she told me. "It could have been worse—outsiders might have exploited the chaos to occupy and harm China."

If rock and roll wasn't going to overturn the status quo, Westerners were sure the Internet would. For at least a year or two, the regime's neophyte computer cops were overwhelmed by the new technology, blocking some Web sites and arresting a few cyber-dissidents while missing countless others. But the Great Firewall of China gradually cut off access to more and more pro-democracy sites; left alone were those promoting pro-Beijing, anti-Western positions. Popular sentiment—especially among the young—echoed the vitriol posted there. "There's a genuine rise in nationalism," another diplomat friend remarked. "These are twentysomethings who see their country being put upon, especially by the big, bad U.S.A."

The new attitude was made brutally plain in May 1999, during the war in the former Yugoslavia, when a NATO jet mistakenly targeted the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese and injuring dozens of others. Back home in China, the streets erupted as they hadn't since 1989. This time, however, riot cops in Beijing directed traffic and authorities gave out bottled water as thousands of protesters swarmed around the U.S. and British embassies, pelting the buildings with bricks and garbage. Later, U.S. Ambassador James Sasser spoke sadly to me of watching through an embassy window as a Chinese security guard picked up a rock and lobbed it straight toward him. After order was restored, I visited the scene with an American military attaché. He seemed in shock as we walked past the U.S. Embassy's paint-spattered entrance, shattered windows and debris. Understandably so: it had been only 10 years since young Chinese had erected their Goddess of Democracy, modeled after the Statue of Liberty, just down the road at Tiananmen.