Mao to Now

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 attach?. 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.

China's hong ke—"red hackers"—had been equally busy. In Beijing and Shenzhen they proudly showed me their handiwork. One of them had vandalized the White House Web site, putting a Hitler mustache on the then President Bill Clinton. Another bragged of posting photos of the Belgrade bombing victims on the U.S. Interior Department's site. After former Tiananmen student leader Wang Dan dared to suggest publicly that the bombing had been an accident, he received anonymous death threats via e-mail, and someone vandalized his pro-democracy june4.org Web site with a big F––– WANG DAN.

In some ways the hackers reminded me of the young naifs like Wang I'd met in Tiananmen Square: idealistic mavericks challenging the official line. There was one big difference. The rebels of 1989 wanted China's leaders to adopt the West's ideals. The rebels of 1999 increasingly viewed the West as their enemy and thought Beijing was, if anything, too soft. China was stronger, more confident and more active on the international stage than it had been for centuries. But nationalism was running wild, and party leaders could only try not to be thrown by the beast they had created.

V. Sea Turtles
The next time thousands took to the streets of Beijing was the night of July 14, 2001. The crowds, though, were purely festive. Fireworks and lasers lit the sky above as 200,000 revelers flocked into Tiananmen Square. Cars instead of tanks rolled down Changan Avenue, full of exuberant young Chinese waving huge red silk flags. China had just been chosen to host the 2008 Olympics, and the people were truly, viscerally ecstatic: at last their country had been recognized as a full-fledged member of the global community.

China's leaders needed the Games the same way they needed Hong Kong. They had to keep earning the public's confidence—what used to be called the Mandate of Heaven—with ever bigger and better achievements: joining the World Trade Organization, putting their own man in space, building the world's biggest dam, the highest railway, even the tallest Ferris wheel. At some level all Chinese are driven by the dream of reclaiming their ancient imperial glory. At the same time, the country's leaders recognize that the giant's sudden awakening is scary for the rest of the world. With the clock ticking down to 2008—and with China's white-hot economy desperate for energy, raw materials and new markets—the regime quickly launched an international "charm offensive" to befriend longtime U.S. allies and international pariahs alike.