Changing the Game in China

By Hannah Beech/Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Susan Jakes/ Shanghai

EAT YOUR HEART OUT, DONALD!

Who would think that China's Donald Trump would be an ex-People's Liberation Army soldier who majored in drainage at the Lanzhou Railroad College? But Wang Shi, who made a spectacular decision in 1984 when he moved to a tiny backwater called Shenzhen, is the country's most successful real estate mogul. He heeded Deng Xiaoping's call to explore the virtues of capitalism, starting a trading company that moved everything from copy machines to the odd crate of shellfish. Although private property was still a dirty word in communist China, in 1993 Wang invested in real estate. He had heard of a man named Trump, and he was intrigued. "I didn't know much about management," he says. "But I thought, Western companies already did it well, so why not just copy that?"

Today Wang's real estate company, Vanke, has projects in 20 cities across China. It had revenues last year of more than $930 million. If his firm grows as it has over the past decade, Vanke in another 10 years could become the world's largest housing provider. Sixty percent of urban Chinese own their homes, up from practically zero when Wang started. And Shenzhen, that sleepy town where Wang, 54, made his base? It's a booming metropolis of 12 million people--one of dozens of cities that have sprouted across the nation seemingly overnight. "You blink in China, and another building goes up," says Wang. --By Hannah Beech/ Shanghai, with reporting by Bu Hua/ Shenzhen

ONLINE PATRIOT

With his slight frame and unassuming expression, Kang Lingyi, 24, hardly looks like a firebrand. But the Internet executive is at the forefront of one of the most powerful movements in China today: nationalism. Kang got his first taste of patriotic power back in 1999, when NATO forces bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Incensed by what he and other Chinese considered to be a deliberate attack, Kang joined 20,000 Chinese hackers who broke into several U.S. government websites, including that of the U.S. embassy in Beijing. Kang now runs one of several dozen patriotic websites, and he gets 30,000 hits a day on such topics as U.S. hubris in Iraq and Washington's friendly relations with Taiwan. "America is much too involved in China's internal affairs," he says. "China does not try to impose its human-rights standards on America."

Kang's feelings suit Beijing. Since the democracy movement exposed fissures in Chinese society 16 years ago, the government has tried to supplement a fading communist ideology with nationalism through a concerted education and media campaign. The two biggest protests in China since 1989 have been patriotic demonstrations essentially endorsed by the government--one an anti-American conflagration after the Belgrade bombing, the other a series of anti-Japanese protests in April that erupted in several Chinese cities. The latest demonstrations were spurred by nationalist websites and cell-phone text-message campaigns that persuaded tens of thousands to march against Japan, a country that they believe has still not fully atoned for its brutal occupation of China 70 years ago.

Strident nationalism is particularly pervasive among Chinese urban youth. Even as they sip Starbucks lattes or line up at the U.S. embassy for student visas, theybridle at what they view as an attempt by the rest of the world to suppress a budding superpower. "America wants to keep China down," Kang says. "We should all be friends. But America must accept China as a friend on an equal footing." --By Hannah Beech/Beijing

HOT NEW FILMMAKER

Exhaling smoke with a particular world-weariness only a beautiful woman can conjure, Xu Jinglei announces she's tired of Oriental mystique, all the brocade and bamboo and aerial kung-fu artistry. That's ironic, given that the movie director, 31, with her chopstick physique and brushstroke features, would fit quite nicely into an epic about a woman named, say, Plum Blossom.

But Xu, a film starlet who has matured into a multitalented cinematic force--she won the Best Director award at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain last year--has grander ambitions than playing to type. "I want to show people that Chinese are just like everyone else," she says. "There's a myth that Eastern people are conservative and mysterious, but we sing and dance and feel the same emotions as anyone else."

Xu's outlook could be a mantra for today's postideological China. What is in some ways most striking about the country, as new middle-class consumers flock to shopping malls, is how normal it feels. Although billboards celebrating the glory of the Communist Party can still be found in Beijing, they tend to elicit derision instead of deference--and even Chairman Mao's visage has morphed into a Pop-art commodity in the capital's avant-garde galleries.

The current darling of a new generation of Chinese filmmakers, Xu may one day take on the mantle worn by venerable directors like Zhang Yimou (House of Flying Daggers, Raise the Red Lantern). Zhang helped introduce Chinese cinema to global audiences, first with finely rendered political allegories and then with more muscular martial-arts epics. On the other hand, Xu--a factory owner's daughter who grew up in go-go China--focuses on what she knows and feels. In her 2002 directorial debut, My Father and I, she explored the upended Confucian hierarchy of contemporary urban Chinese society. That effort, in which she also played the leading role, was followed last year by A Letter from an Unknown Woman, which takes an Austrian novel, places it in war-torn China and contemplates the universality of unrequited love. "My generation is more focused on internal feelings," she says. "The bigger issues like politics are for the older generation."

In truth, overtly political films, like some of Zhang's work, still have no chance of being screened in China without undergoing major cuts by the censorship board. But Xu's avoidance of political fare doesn't mean she is content to churn out the cliched boy-meets-girl comedies that are the mainstay of Chinese cinema. Her next two projects will tackle serious topics. One is a Tang-dynasty drama that she says will demonstrate that "court life is no different from street life." The other is an examination of post-9/11 America.

"I want to be recognized not just in China," she says. "I think Americans would be interested to know what a Chinese girl thinks about things." Even if the girl in question isn't wrapped in embroidered silk or delivering a kung-fu kick. --By Hannah Beech/ Beijing

THE LAWYER WHO IS OUT

When a young lawyer named Zhou Dan started writing about being gay on Chinese websites in 2001, he hoped his honesty would help combat prejudice. Homosexuality was--and still is--very much in the closet in China; Beijing had just taken it off an official list of mental disorders. Zhou's entries, signed with his own name, had an unintended consequence. Gay men from around China who had faced workplace discrimination, blackmail and even prison time started to seek his legal counsel. So Zhou, 31, decided to act on his conviction that "a good lawyer should know not only how to make money from the profession but also how to advance some mission related to social justice."

Today he is China's leading voice for gay rights. Zhou helped start a hotline for "sexual minorities" in his native Shanghai in 2003, and he teaches China's first graduate-school class on homosexuality and social science at Fudan University. Lately he has taken on the issue of AIDS, successfully lobbying the Ministry of Health not to bar HIV-positive people from government jobs. He is collecting testimony from HIV patients and legal experts to urge Shanghai's health department to change rules that he says discriminate against people with the virus.

Beijing's new willingness to confront AIDS--China's HIV caseload, now about 1 million, is swelling as much as 30% a year--has given Zhou the chance to broach taboo issues like human rights and equality under the law. If he can champion the rights of AIDS patients, he reasons, then someday he may be able to do the same for gay men--or anyone else. Zhou dreams of representing a gay man in an antidiscrimination lawsuit, but so far, no plaintiffs are willing to brave the exposure. "Law and policy always involve compromise," he says, "and sometimes being a progressive means taking things one step at a time." --By Susan Jakes/ Shanghai

GHOST WRITER

Bitter memories shape the way Li Shasha, one the nation's youngest best-selling authors, writes about the contradictions of modern China. Li's father left his village in Hunan province to toil in the southern factories that power the nation's export-led growth. When Li was 13, his father came to the school where he boarded. The watchman, apparently not believing that the shabby migrant could be a student's father, didn't let him in.

In many ways, Li embodies the Chinese dream: poor country boy works hard, becomes the only one from his school to go to college and makes it in the big city. But Li is concerned about those who didn't make it: the 100 million rural inhabitants--including his own parents--who have fled exorbitant taxes and dwindling agricultural prices and flooded the cities in search of work. Those migrants are what Li calls "ghosts in the city." "They have built the cities that China is proud of," he says, "but they are barely treated as human beings."

Li decided to write about their plight, and his accounts of the rural poor resonate with Chinese readers. This year he was nominated for the country's top literary award for debut authors. But China's publishers, wary of offending the censors, haven't been as encouraging. The first edition of Li's 2004 coming-of-age novel, Red X, quickly sold out, but there has not been a second printing. Li, 23, has refused the publisher's request to edit out what it called "morally offensive" passages. Li can't yet support his parents so that they can quit their factory jobs. "Maybe this year I can make enough money for them to retire," says Li. Then two ghosts will leave the city, but there will always be millions more to take their place. --By Hannah Beech/ Guangzhou

A LEADER WHO LISTENS

With its forest of neon-emblazoned high-rises, Shanghai's Xuhui district embodies the country's dazzling economic development. But Xuhui is profiting from an even rarer commodity: political reform. Led by district Mayor Sun Chao, Xuhui's nearly 1 million inhabitants can participate in town-hall-style meetings to discuss a wide range of concerns, such as an innovative parole program and the location of a new garbage dump. "Before, leaders just made decisions," Sun says. "Now we have public hearings to allow ordinary people to debate things." That idea may sound suspiciously like democracy. But Sun, a smooth-talking constitutional-law expert who has lectured at Yale, isn't going that far. "It is science," he says, deftly sidestepping the issue. "We shouldn't trust ourselves, even if we have power. We should listen to others' opinions."

That is not your usual local Chinese politics. Sun, 49, with impeccable English and a press-the-flesh attitude, represents a new crop of Chinese leaders who are different from the previous, Soviet-trained generation, which issued edicts from behind a bamboo curtain. Although Sun and his brethren are hardly harbingers of a democratic revolution, they are aware that an increasingly economically savvy populace will demand more accountability. Hence Sun's pledge that his budgets will undergo an anti-corruption audit and his proud declaration that he has personally answered 10,000 e-mails from the public since taking office last year. The change is remarkable. Five years ago, many government offices didn't even have a phone number that citizens could call. There is no guarantee that leaders like Sun will one day rule China. But Sun is already making history. --By Hannah Beech/Shanghai

BILLION-DOLLAR GAMER

Five years ago, Chen Tianqiao started a bare-bones online gaming company with five employees, two of whom were his wife and brother. Today, after a dazzling IPO, the 31-year-old is one of China's richest men, worth more than $1 billion, with a staff of more than 1,000 and building an interactive-media empire that soon could turn him into a local Rupert Murdoch. Even in the turbo-charged world of Chinese business, Chen's firm, Shanda Networking, has posted stunning growth, expanding 20% each quarter, with $73 million in net income last year. "China has a business history of not much more than 20 years," says Chen. "We live in a completely different world from our parents, where you can achieve success very quickly."

Shanda first courted success with a concept that's bigger in Asia than in the U.S.: online games, a $370 million industry in China in which players interact with each other via the Internet in a virtual world of dragons, maidens and sword fights. Chen has bought majority stakes in Sina, the country's largest portal, and a host of other online gaming companies. Next up, Shanda, in collaboration with Intel, hopes to introduce a set-top box that will enable users to access everything from news, music and movies to games and online auction sites. Currently, only 20 million Chinese own computers, but 330 million have TVs. Will interactive TV catch on? "The Chinese are very fast learners," he says. His own history is proof of that. --By Hannah Beech/Shanghai

OLYMPIAN MASTER PLANNER

If you can picture Washington, New York City and the Silicon Valley rolled into one, a city that has hosted the best-ever Olympics, managed severe water and land shortages and built 11 new suburbs, five subway lines and miles of highways, all while preserving its unique history without exhausting its finances, then maybe you can begin to imagine what it's like to be Huang Yan. It's her job to create that city out of present-day Beijing. As Deputy Head of the city's Urban Planning Commission and a key player in preparations for the 2008 Olympics, Huang is taking on the country's stickiest development problems--migration, pollution, corruption--and its deepest ambitions: to be modern, prosperous and globally respected. Huang, 40, is a new kind of bureaucrat. The English-speaking architect, trained in Belgium, Germany and China, is not a Communist Party member. She is striving "to bring fresh air" to China's musty, Soviet-style planning dogmas, which have left much of the capital grim, dusty and clogged with traffic. Huang argues for more attention to how humans actually live, what makes sense for the environment and how to adapt to China's racing real estate market.

Huang, who helped clinch Beijing's Olympic bid, wooed top foreign architects like Rem Koolhaas and Jacques Herzog to outfit the city for the Games---a move some criticized as unpatriotic and others lauded as visionary. "In China it can be hard to get people to think past the next week, or what's good for a certain neighborhood," she says, "But planning a city like Beijing requires a much longer view." That, and no small amount of imagination. --By Susan Jakes

With reporting by Bu Hua/ Shenzhen