A SUITABLE PROFESSION

WANG YUE, 19, REMEMBERS STROLLING down a Beijing street dressed normally–spiky, red-tinged hair, studded dog collar, brows drawn in an exaggerated arch–when she saw a familiar figure. It was her father, a policeman, with several of his colleagues. ““I called to him two or three times,’’ she recalls, taking a long drag on a cigarette, ““but he just ignored me and kept walking! That happens all the time to us punks.’’ Wang doesn’t tell her parents she lives with her British boyfriend. ““My mother would just go crazy if she knew,’’ she says. ““She sure pays attention when I get my period. She always comes to me with sanitary napkins and says, “Honey, isn’t it time to use these?’ ''

Wang is a sassy voice of the post-post-Tiananmen generation, which is rarely heard in the West. Wang and two friends–Yang Fan on drums, Yilinna on bass–make up Hang on the Box, Beijing’s only teenage-girl punk band. They don’t care about politics, but they’re not afraid of talking about absolutely anything. The police don’t hassle them. Like so many Chinese these days, they just somehow fall between the cracks. Compared with older Chinese, they float between East and West with uncanny ease. Yang, a waifish 17-year-old, casually drops quotes from sources as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Agatha Christie and Sigmund Freud, Jim Morrison and cross-dressing singer Marilyn Manson: ““He’s really cool.’’ Squeals Wang: ““She wants to f— Marilyn Manson!’’ Yang reacts in mock horror.

Just about nothing seems to move the Beijing punks. They played a few gigs at a seedy bar called Scream until it closed down. They gather at Wang’s boyfriend’s spartan flat to lounge on a mattress on the floor, listen to CDs, doodle on the walls and chain-smoke cheap cigarettes. ““We would smoke hashish, but only if people gave it to us,’’ confesses one. ““It’s expensive.''

The girls got their start after Yang’s father, a musician, lent them his rehearsal room. Says Yang: ““He thinks what I do isn’t suitable for a woman. He wants me to get married–but not until I’m 24!’’ Wang’s father once tried to sneak into the Scream bar to see them perform. ““He freaked out when he saw the Mohawk punks. My parents belong to a completely different generation. Growing up, they thought of nothing but the Communist Party cause,’’ she says. ““They made love for the first time after they got married.’’ Wang pops in a CD by the women’s band Xray Specs. The trio sings along: ““Some people think girls should be seen but not heard . . . Oh bondage, up yours . . .''

Talk turns to the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. ““I was so young, but I heard gunfire and tanks,’’ recalls Wang. ““My mother told me it all started when some people tried to stop corruption. But they couldn’t do much, because China isn’t a democracy, after all,’’ she says. ““Yes, many people died. But if the Army hadn’t moved, it could have been worse. Outsiders might have exploited the chaos to occupy and harm China.’’ At least for now, the trio has no beef with the regime. They may be rebels, but they’re proud to be Chinese.

KATHARINA HESSE

PLAYING THE NET GAME

ON THE SURFACE, IT LOOKED AS IF CHINA’S widening crackdown on the Internet threatened to destroy the cyberspace empire of Edward Q. Zeng. Certainly no one had more to lose last month when Beijing ordered all Internet cafEs to register with local authorities and provide lists of their customers. As chairman and CEO of Sparkice, Zeng runs Beijing’s largest Internet cafE chain. Yet the young entrepreneur welcomed the new rules–not least because he helped draft them in his self-described role as a ““government adviser.’’ Now he is poised not only to survive the authorities’ scrutiny, but to buy up competitors who do not. The cybersweep is ““good news,’’ says Zeng. ““It will be good for mergers and acquisitions.''

This is how the wily players make it in Chinese cyberspace: with an insider’s understanding of official tolerance. Zeng is a former State Planning Commission bureaucrat who says, at least half seriously, that he still spends ““a third of my time working for the government.’’ He opened Beijing’s first Internet cafE in November 1996, two months after the authorities started blocking politically sensitive Web sites, including major U.S. media and some pornography. While Zeng toed the line and prospered, the less careful are likely to get crushed as the political bosses continue to tighten controls. By last month officials were reportedly planning to set up online police checkpoints in cities across the country, and a Shanghai software entrepreneur received a two-year prison term for sending 30,000 e-mail addresses to VIP Reference, a dissident electronic magazine published in the United States. ““In China, if you push too hard, you are dead,’’ Zeng once said. ““But if you work together with the government so that the government thinks that it is in control, then things will gradually become more and more open.''

He was right. Despite the crackdown, new China users are signing on faster than you can say ““china.com.’’ Their numbers rose from 670,000 in 1997 to 2.1 million today, and experts predict as many as 10 million by next year. The government is trying to control the boom–not kill it–with electronic blocks and filters. Known as the Great China Firewall, the system still has plenty of holes. In October a hacker known as Bronc Buster got into the official Human Rights Web site and left a message mocking it as ““total propaganda.’’ Since China’s cybercops focus on high-profile sites, many obscure sites can get away with anything. ““The irony,’’ one Beijing-based surfer quips, ““is that Playboy is blocked, but if you want gay boys in bondage, no problem.''

The authorities would put a stop to it if they could. More than 200 Internet cafEs have been registered in Beijing since 1996, and Zeng figures two thirds will be shut down, many as alleged fronts for gambling rings and prostitution. ““Other stores have damaged our reputation,’’ says Zeng, who plans to build his cafE into a chain of e-commerce ““portals,’’ designed to fill gaps in China’s Internet shopping services. For example, it’s now impossible to pay a bill over the Internet in China, for lack of a national credit-clearing center. So Sparkice will offer a kind of one-stop e-mail shop, where customers can make orders and payments and even learn how to operate the computer.

As Zeng well knows, clean electronic commerce is exactly what Beijing hopes to encourage. Last summer the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation launched a Web site promoting export products from BMX bikes to pumpkin seeds. After a survey in June 1998 revealed that 78 percent of Internet users want to shop, others are sure to follow the state into Internet advertising. Today most of China’s Net users are young, male, English-speaking urban professionals, but not all. Zeng points to a computer-illiterate garlic farmer in Guizhou province who had a university student help set up a Web site that has drawn in customers for his garlic from as far away as Europe. With that kind of business potential, says Zeng, it’s unlikely the government will ever try to shut off access to the Internet, no matter how sorely the rules are tested.

LESLIE PAPPAS

BEATING THE BUREAUCRATS

LIU YONGHAO LIKES TO MAKE SURE EVERYBODY knows he is contributing to society. Like most Chinese entrepreneurs, the feed-grain producer has learned to placate government officials when political winds shift. After the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen protesters, government propaganda became so antibusiness that he even considered changing careers. Now Liu heads China’s largest private business, at a time when sclerotic state enterprises are laying off workers. So it’s understandable that Liu is investing in a little pre-emptive public-relations work, just to make sure nobody thinks he is getting too greedy. With nine other tycoons, Liu recently donated $24.4 million to help set up factories that will employ laid-off workers. Liu says he wants to ““help the state sector escape its difficulties.''

Liu is too busy expanding his business to dwell on political crackdowns. But he did learn the hard way that government bureaucrats still favor state industry over the private sector. In 1992 Liu tried to take over a state enterprise when a failing feed mill approached him for help. Liu wanted to acquire an 80 percent stake in the venture. Local authorities approved the sale, but higher-level officials blocked it. ““They said, “How could a private enterprise buy a state-owned one?’ ’’ Liu remembers. ““In some people’s minds, a private firm is somehow inferior.’’ Private businesses still have to fight red tape at every turn: 20 of them, including Liu’s, finally got permission only in January to trade directly with the outside world.

Companies like Liu’s may be China’s salvation, though there are still conservative officials who don’t like their freewheeling ways. Prime Minister Zhu Rongji is struggling to overhaul the country’s inefficient state sector. Unemployment has hit record levels, and China is buffeted by debt problems and social tensions caused by the growing gap between rich and poor. Zhu is counting on China’s 70 million private businesses to absorb the unemployed. They are also a source of innovation. A unit of Liu’s Hope Group was the first private company to openly list on the Chinese stock market. Frustrated that state banks wouldn’t lend to private businesses, Liu cofounded China’s first private bank.

Liu is winning the war against conservative bureaucrats. From his start on a quail farm in Sichuan, he now employs 16,000 people and controls 107 factories all over China. Last year he flew to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful. And to make sure he gets the export permits he needs back home, he has moved into politics. He is the only private entrepreneur to be elected to the standing committee of the political body that advises the State Council. ““Don’t get depressed during difficult times,’’ he says. ““Stay cool-headed when victory comes.’’ And keep the bureaucrats at bay.

LIJIA MACLEOD

LEGAL WEAPONS

NOT SO LONG AGO, A FIERCE POLITICAL debate in China typically ended with one of the parties being shipped off to a labor camp. The loser was always the one most out of step with the prevailing party line. To the relief of progressive newspaper commentator Ma Licheng, those days are gone. In March, he took on an influential Marxist editor and ideologue in a bitter public spat, but instead of ending up in a remote gulag, he landed in Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court. ““This is China’s first case using the law to resolve a theoretical struggle,’’ Ma says. ““This shows China is progressing.''

The trial is a small victory for efforts to establish the rule of law over Communist Party whim in China. The battle started when Duan Ruofei picked up a copy of ““Crossing Swords,’’ the hot reformist tome of the season, edited by Ma and a colleague. Duan, a well-known conservative editor, was startled to see excerpts of his ““10,000-character essays’’ reprinted and ridiculed. Ma dismissed Duan’s criticism of capitalism–including his warning that private ownership could turn China into ““a vassal of international capitalism’’–as a senseless scare tactic. Duan responded by calling Ma a ““running dog of the United States,’’ and went on the attack. He charged that Ma had violated his intellectual property rights by reprinting a ““rough draft’’ (though Duan had circulated more than 3,000 copies, and it was reprinted by Hong Kong publications– illegally, Duan claims).

The November trial created an immediate sensation. It was one of Beijing’s first trials open to the public, and so many people showed up–including dozens of journalists–that 30 extra seats were hastily brought into the courtroom. Ma says Duan, humiliated by ““Crossing Swords,’’ is trying to ““use the law as a weapon’’ to get revenge. He claims Duan stayed away from court because ““he didn’t dare show his face’’ before a largely hostile crowd. Duan responds that the ““lower status’’ of the defendants ““didn’t justify my crossing swords with them,’’ but indeed the gallery did not seem sympathetic. Chinese journalists broke out in chuckles when Duan’s lawyer tried to establish the fame of his client, who is well-known for suspicion of the West, by citing his entry in a British Who’s Who.

By all accounts, the judge did his best to keep the trial focused on the law, but things haven’t changed that much in China. If and when the verdict comes, it is sure to be seen as a sign of who’s up and who’s down in Beijing. A victory for Ma will be a victory for reformers, and likewise for Duan and the conservatives. Indeed, the high stakes may be one reason the judge deferred a verdict and advised the parties to settle out of court. So far, they’re not talking, though Duan says he’s willing. Among other things, he wants a public apology and $24,000 in material and psychological damages. All told, that’s progress, compared with the days of the party’s kangaroo courts.

MELINDA LIU

REAL CHINESE DEMOCRACY

THE PARTY CHIEFS IN BUYUN FIGURED THEY had to try something radical, even clandestine. Farmers in this remote Sichuan township were clamoring for good government, and had already run one local boss out of town. So, in a hush-hush operation, the local cadres organized the first direct township election ever held in China, where only the Communist Party has the authority to endorse township chiefs. In a 10-day campaign before the vote on New Year’s Eve, candidates engaged in 13 debates and street-level stumping the likes of which China has never seen. Participants described the contest as ““historic,’’ if a bit clumsy.

After all, everyone involved was a novice at democracy. For a decade Beijing has allowed rural-village elections that often offer a choice between carefully vetted Communist Party members–and has trumpeted these choreographed exercises as a sign of ““democratization.’’ But Buyun was a great, unauthorized leap forward. Unlike the figurehead chiefs of tiny villages, the heads of much larger townships have real power over tax collections, roads, family planning and other matters. In Buyun (population: 16,000), voters had a more genuine choice.

First, community representatives voted in a sort of primary, from which schoolteacher Zhou Xingyi, who is not even a party member, emerged as front runner. Next came a local farmer and, in last place, Communist Party candidate Tan Xiaoqui, a college-educated ex-soldier. When local party cadres grilled the three finalists on how to run township finances, none could answer smoothly, but Tan was positively embarrassing. ““I’ll just learn from you, sir,’’ he said. To which one party official whispered angrily, ““What kind of an answer is that?’’ But over the course of the campaign, Tan would undergo a ““dramatic personality change,’’ shedding his slow-speaking introversion, says one witness to the campaign, Beijing academic Li Fan. ““The weather is cold, but my blood is boiling,’’ Tan blurted out in one speech. ““Thank you for giving me a chance to use my blood, sweat and tears to help.''

The voters were just as earthy, demanding better schools and pollution controls. In one meeting a farmer waved a mobile phone in the air and shouted, to wild applause, ““Do you know what this is? People along the coast use it to do business. But here it’s just a chunk of metal. Who can get us connected?’’ Tan responded with promises to boost the yearly income of every voter by 200 yuan (about $25). On the last day he led a motorcycle ““campaign motorcade’’ through 12 villages, and won with 50.19 percent of the vote.

The question now is whether the authorities will let the results stand. Informed of the campaign only two days before it took place, the higher-ups in Beijing nonetheless appear ready to let Tan have his victory–so long as other townships don’t follow suit. A semi-official commentary in the Legal Daily warned that ““democracy cannot surpass law,’’ but concluded with unusual sympathy. ““We shouldn’t be too critical,’’ it said. The vote ““shows democracy is not just a patented product of the West.’’ Indeed, it would be hard to produce another candidate like Tan, who appears to have won not only a job, but also a small place in history.