Mao to Now

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.

America, frantically dealing with a cascade of international crises, scarcely noticed how Chinese influence was spreading. Chinese diplomats insisted the idea wasn't to elbow the United States aside. "It's not possible for China to be a superpower—a power, maybe, but not a superpower," a relaxed Chinese official told me during a long background chat at a Beijing Starbucks in 2005. "We don't talk about empire." (Yes, China's bureaucrats talk on background now.)

At home, too, a new sense of concern about the country's image began to push the leadership to be more responsive to people's complaints about pollution and labor abuses—and especially, the demolition of people's homes as bulldozers and construction cranes rampaged through Chinese cities. In 2003 one man set himself on fire to protest the razing of his house by an unscrupulous developer; when a photographer and I went to the hospital, his furious relatives held administrators at bay so we could sneak into his room. As I was writing this chapter, a contact phoned, out of breath, to say: "Thugs are evicting someone in Fengtai district. Please tell the foreign media to go and report on it."