Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China

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October 27, 2011Jonathan Mirsky

Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China

by Jianying ZhaNew Press, 228 pp., $24.95Jianying Zha describes China as “way too big a cow for anyone to tackle in full.” Therefore, Ms.Zha says, she omits “the rural life, the small-town stories, the migrants working in hugemanufacturing plants…continued poverty in parts of interior rural China, surging labor unrest incoastal factories, the injustice of the legal system, rampant corruption among local officials,ethnic tension, and environmental destruction….” These urgent matters, requiring sustainedattention, include most of China’s problems and people.So who remains? Who are China’s movers and shakers? In the US, movers and shakers areelected and nonelected government officials, big-business people, media publishers, editors, andcolumnists, lobbyists, NGO executives, racial and religious leaders—all fundamental to how thecountry functions. In China the list is short: as Ms. Zha herself makes plain, China is run at everylevel by the Communist Party, so much so, she observes, that the usual definition of the word“university” is meaningless there. But so is Zha’s title. Three of her six chapters focus on threevery rich men and one very rich woman. Her other three subjects are Party-dominatedprofessors; Zha’s brother, recently freed after nine years in prison for helping found the ChinaDemocracy Party; and Wang Meng, a writer and ex–culture minister, who admires Mao andfears for China if the Party no longer rules.Zha, who now lives in the US and endured terror with her family during the Cultural Revolution,enrolled at Peking University in 1978, where, she makes clear in this book, the Party remains incontrol. She went to America in 1981, returned to China, wrote novellas, and worked as anassistant in the

New York Times

Beijing office. After participating in the Tiananmen uprising she“retreated” to the US and married. In 2003 she went back to China, where, she says, her book

The Eighties

, based on conversations with “a dozen of China’s leading creative minds” on the“momentous decade” before Tiananmen, “ended up at the top of the sales charts in manybookstores.” Later it was “voted [by whom?] one of the most influential books of the previousdecade in China.” To her great credit she was a signer in 2008 of Charter 08, which called for anexpansion of freedom in China and led to the detention of some of the signers, most famouslyLiu Xiaobo, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, now serving an eleven-year sentence, which,Zha notes, “shocked all of us.” Who “us” is she doesn’t say.

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Do the three very rich men and one very rich woman Zha describes, part of her “community of kindred spirits,” tell us much about China’s movers and shakers? One is Sun Lizhe, who uses theterm “tide player” to describe his own adaptability to China’s shifting political and economiccircumstances. He was once a self-trained country doctor, praised by Mao himself as a modelCommunist youth. His unlicensed medical practice lost its political backing in the post-Mao eraand he moved to Chicago, where he briefly studied medicine, acquired US citizenship, and beganinvesting in publishers specializing in business and technology. In 2000, he was hired by CITIC,one of China’s most successful publishers, to bring Western business, educational, and self-help

2books to China. Having recently been forced out of the company, he spends his time plottingfuture publishing ventures and offering “unconventional” medical advice online.Then there is Zhang Dazhong, a self-educated entrepreneur who started out working at a grocerystore and making electric lamps on the side, eventually building one of China’s largestelectronics retailers, which he sold in 2007 to found a venture capital firm. In 2008, he paid thesingle “biggest individual tax payment in the history of the People’s Republic.”Zhang started his business with a sum paid by the government in compensation for the death of his mother, a kindergarten teacher who was executed in 1970 for having publicly criticized Mao.Zhang spent years trying to have the verdict reversed and succeeded in 1980 after he “concededthat his mother suffered mental illness when she criticized Mao.”Since getting out of the electronics business, Zhang has decided this compromise is unacceptableand has again taken up his mother’s “rehabilitation” by hiring a filmmaker to make adocumentary about her trial and execution and a lawyer to prepare an appeal. He bought onethousand copies of Jon Halliday and Jung Chang’s

Mao: The Unknown Story

, a “devastatinglynegative” biography officially banned in mainland China but available in Hong Kong.Yet Zhang is “cautious about political action and has no intention of doing anything radical.” Hetells Zha that he has no “bone to pick with the current leadership” and is “pretty comfortablewith the present pace of change.” Making clear her own vision of what is good for China, Zhapraises Zhang’s “prudence” because for men like him “their very existence depends on thepolicies and goodwill of a regime that did not begin its rule by being nice to the propertiedclass.”Zha’s two other movers and shakers are the married property tycoons Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi.Ms. Zhang spent her teens working in Hong Kong factories before getting a scholarship to theUniversity of Sussex and eventually working for Goldman Sachs. Pan was educated in China andleft his job in the state petroleum bureaucracy to pursue real estate projects in the liberalized“special economic zones” established in southern China beginning in the 1980s. In 1994,yearning to move back to China, Zhang set up an interview with Pan, hoping to find work raisingcapital for his ventures. He proposed four days later. The couple has become one of China’s mostsuccessful real estate developers, building expensive luxury apartment complexes in and aroundBeijing.Much is made of the tension between Pan’s business expertise and Zhang’s idealism, which sheattributes to her English education:She once wanted to be an intellectual, someone with a sense of social responsibility. Butnow she is viewed as a rich person, and in China today the rich are assumed to be devoidof social ethics or public spirit.A Hong Kong critic, writes Zha, condemns the couple as “being the self-satisfied creators of anew kitsch…the lifestyles and buildings they promote are nothing but superficial, sterile trend-mongering.” Zhang herself says little to contradict this. She described her world to Zha:It’s all a messy tangle. Many things in China are vague. Some of our clients walk in andbuy a dozen apartments in one shot. You don’t know where they got the money. You justknow that some Chinese have a lot of it. It’s a waste of time to try to clarifyeverything…. I’m not one who can fish in murky water. Pan is totally comfortable withmurkiness. That’s his normal state. And I’ve learned to tolerate it.

3But Zhang is shocked, she told Zha, by “how Chinese hated the new rich like her and herhusband, and at how much anger and negative sentiment percolated on the Internet…. Now sheseriously worries that the country is heading toward a major crisis.” Zhang and her husband“have found their faith in Bahai,” a religion persecuted in some Muslim countries that poses nothreat in China.Zhang, we learn, hired the artist Ai Weiwei, recently released after eighty-one days in prison andstill willing to eloquently criticize the regime, to oversee installations on the grounds of one of her huge properties. Zha remarks of this that “his reputation as an inveterate troublemaker wouldhave scared off most developers, but Zhang gave him a budget and promised him total freedom.Ai didn’t disappoint her.” Zha fails to mention that Ai was one of the designers of the Olympic“Bird’s Nest” stadium, and the word “troublemaker” (not hers but the Party’s) in China helpsexplain why earlier this year he was arrested.None of Zha’s three super-rich examples move or shake China apart from the circles of richentrepreneurs that they inhabit. Beijing, she writes, lifting it into a stratosphere unknown to allbut a sliver of the Chinese population, is “the home of high culture, state pomp, bohemianenclaves, northern vernacular, noble plans, fantastic gossip, and tragicomedies large and small.”But this enclave has not appeared from nowhere. Some of its members gave up their democraticbeliefs and accepted the Party dictatorship in Deng Xiaoping’s China, especially afterTiananmen in 1989. Zha admires Liu Xiaobo. Before his detention he wrote this of China’s newsuper-rich:A number of acquaintances of mine from the days of the 1989 protests went into businessand got rich after the massacre…. They speak expansively about the great affairs of theworld and swear that they by no means went into business just to get rich…. Theyenumerate the ways in which their money-making is good for Chinese society…. Aboveall, they hold that a revolution done by rich people inevitably will be the least costly of revolutions, because the market has taught such people—themselves—how to make goodcost-benefit calculations.Zha has written this book because “the chance to join a community of kindred spirits to push formeaningful change and to build a more democratic, humane China was too enticing to ignore.”But she provides no evidence that her kindred spirits are much concerned about change or aboutbuilding the officially named “harmonious society,” which “reflects a softer approach in bothinternational and domestic politics.” As she describes them, they sound like the tycoons LiuXiaobo was writing about.Zha maintains, “On the whole, the political atmosphere in China really has eased, and people area little less afraid.” She claims that lawyers increasingly take up human rights cases and that“scholars investigate the ‘blank spots’ of history…the great famine of 1959–62…publishers defytaboos….” She calls today’s dissidents “a small cluster of hardheaded, isolatedindividuals…locked up, kicked out of the country, or kept on the margins.”What unfortunate timing for Zha and her publisher! The artist Ai Weiwei is a man who is muchadmired and not “isolated,” as his recent statements show. Nor can Chinese like Ai and theincreasing number of other dissidents entering or risking detention count on a legal defense,although there are many brave lawyers in China. As the authority on Chinese law Jerome Cohenrecently wrote:

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