The first time I met Lili Li one sweltering Beijing day in 2001, I was nervous. She was no longer the movie star and sex symbol who ruled the Chinese box office along with Ruan Lingyu and Butterfly Wu in the 1930s and 1940s. She was an elderly woman in her eighties, decades past her time in the limelight. I was excited to meet her because I had taught about her films when I was instructing undergraduates as a Harvard Teaching Fellow, but I was also nervous because she was about to become my grandmother-in-law, and I wanted to make a good first impression.

The Beijing traffic was terrible that day, as it is most days, and my fiancée, Jessica, and I were 2 hours late to our meeting with her grandmother. Not a way to make a good first impression, I thought. Neither were the streaks of sludge on the bottom of my khakis that must have wiped off from the car door as I got out.

I entered a sparsely decorated home and was led to the living room, where Lili Li waited for us. The only indications that we were in the home of a movie star were the dozens of oil paintings by famed painter Ai Zhongxin, Lili Li’s second husband, lining the walls. A copy of Ai’s famous revolutionary piece, depicting the torment of China’s countryside in the pre-Communist era, hung next to one detailing the tribulations of the Long March. My favorite was of a young Lili Li in her heyday as a movie actress, with her famous large, doe-like eyes and long, flowing, jet-black hair.

Sitting on a wooden chair and drinking tea as I entered the room was Lili Li. Her hair had turned a grayish white, and she wore a simple floral shirt. As I walked over to sit next to her, she met me with a warm smile and a hug. Although she was no longer movie-star beautiful, she still had that star quality that lights up a room.

Within minutes, Lili Li had taken me by surprise. Rather than talk pleasantries, as I had expected, she immediately started to tell me about the pain of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and her searing hatred for Jiang Qing, known to the Western world as Madame Mao, leader of the dreaded Gang of Four. Lili Li welcomed me into the family by teaching me about what it had suffered for standing against tyranny.

The pain of the Cultural Revolution was not easily forgotten for Lili Li. Until that day, I knew about the Cultural Revolution only from what I read in textbooks, heard from Western professors, or saw in snippets in Western movies, but Lili Li brought the pain and horror to life.

She began by telling me about Luo Jingyu, her first husband, a famed filmmaker and head of the China Film Studio, who had received an award from President Franklin D. Roosevelt for resisting Japanese aggression during World War II. During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards, the radical and violent student groups, hounded her husband, as they did many elites. Wielding the Red Guards as an instrument of terror, the Gang of Four sought personal power under the cloak of advancing socialism and class struggle. Elites throughout the country were tortured, jailed, or murdered during the tumult. Universities were shut down for 10 years, and the country lost decades of progress.

Red Guards tortured Lili Li’s husband until he could bear the pain no more and committed suicide. His body was never found. Only his eyeglasses were returned to her.

Lili Li had also suffered personal torture and public humiliation. Red Guards shaved her hair in front of a seething mob and hung posters denouncing her in large characters around the country’s capital. They harassed her entire family. As a result of malnourishment and stress, my mother-in-law gave birth to my wife and her identical twin sister several months early. My wife is beautiful but petite, a subtle reminder of China’s dark past and its ongoing ramifications.

Hearing Lili Li speak of the horror of the Cultural Revolution, I kept asking myself: What could she have done to warrant such suffering? Why was she singled out? How many others suffered because of evil politicians? Lili Li’s story, as it turns out, sheds light on the Gang of Four; it explains the harsh past of many of China’s current leaders, how it makes them act the way they do, and why so many Chinese are optimistic about their futures.

The story starts 80 years earlier, when Bette Davis and Betty Grable ruled Hollywood’s silver screen and Yankee greats Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio dominated the baseball diamond. Lili Li was China’s marquee actress and led a Hollywood lifestyle, counting international megastars like Charlie Chaplin as close friends.

At that time, a C-list actress called Lan Ping entered Lili Li’s sphere. She had lesser parts in several movies alongside Lili Li. Lan Ping was good-looking enough to make it into movies but not memorable enough to capture the hearts of audiences. Known for her fiery temper, Lan Ping battled everyone around her, directors and fellow stars alike, jockeying for better parts and more money. She rarely got her way. Perhaps it was because she lacked talent, or maybe it was just because audiences could sense ice in her heart, but she did not become famous until decades later for different reasons.

Driven by clawing ambition and a willingness to step on others, Lan Ping scored her largest role as the fourth wife of Mao Zedong and the cornerstone of the Gang of Four. She changed her name to Jiang Qing and began using violence to gain power and exact personal vendettas.

Jiang Qing hated Lili Li and her family. She blamed Lili Li and her husband Luo for preventing her rise to stardom. She also hated Lili Li because she came from a heavyweight political background that could limit her power.

Lili Li’s father, Qian Zhuangfei, was an early hero of the Chinese Communist Party, which he had joined in 1925. Unlike many of the early members, Qian came from a wealthy background and gave up a life of comfort to help the masses. He traced his lineage back to Zhang Tingyu, a powerful premier for several decades during the Qing Dynasty under Qing emperors Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Qian also had been close friends with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, whom Jiang Qing despised. Many predicted Qian would become the future prime minister because of his belief in Communism and broad-based support.

Qian became a double agent for the Communists during the bitter Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) between the Nationalists and Communists. Under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, he was in charge of rooting out Communists. Few thought someone with such a gilded background as Qian would turn his back on riches to become Communist and help the masses.

After ruthlessly torturing a Communist Party member, Chiang Kai-shek discovered Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai’s hiding place. To warn the two prominent Communist leaders that they were about to be caught, Qian had to blow his cover. He became a personal target of Chiang Kai-shek and a hero of the Communist cause. Qian died during the Long March, a decisive but tortuous 8,000-mile trek the Communists undertook while being pursued and attacked by the Nationalists before regrouping at Yan’an in Shaanxi province.

The Party proclaimed Qian a martyr for his sacrifice on the people’s behalf. Monuments have been erected around the country, and schoolchildren learn about his exploits and sacrifice for the masses. The Chinese Communist Party recently named Qian one of the 50 most important party members in history, despite having been killed more than a decade before the official founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Out of friendship and gratitude to Qian for saving his life, Zhou Enlai went out of his way to care for Qian’s daughter, Lili Li.

During the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing sought to eradicate threats to her dominance and exact revenge for petty offenses. She attacked Lili Li’s family with a vengeance reserved for her most bitter enemies and rivals. As Lili Li continued to relate to me the pain her family had endured to create a better life for everyday Chinese, her eyes turned sad.

In the years before she passed away in 2005, Lili Li continued to tell me more about the evil that Jiang Qing perpetrated and how it is the duty of a people blessed with so much to do what is right—even in the face of tyranny. She reinforced the importance of standing up to evil and sacrificing for the country. She had even told Jessica, when she went to America for graduate studies in finance at Boston College, that it was her duty to return to China to help reform the financial system and help make it strong. A life that did not help the country wasted all the sacrifices of previous generations.

What most surprised me about our conversations was when Lili Li told me that, overall, she liked Mao Zedong. She mostly blamed Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four for the tyranny and suffering they had caused the nation. Sure, Mao made mistakes, she said, especially as he aged, but overall he did good things for China.

For me, whose view of Mao until then had been mostly shaped by Western professors and media, I was surprised that she had anything nice to say about the former supreme leader. Westerners portrayed him as evil and as someone who killed his own people to maintain power, on par with Hitler or Stalin. I thought anyone who liked Mao likewise must have been evil or brainwashed by Chinese propaganda. But Lili Li was not easily swayed by propaganda, cowed by fear, or complicit with the horrors of the Gang of Four. She was someone who personally knew Mao and other leaders and who had suffered terribly during the Cultural Revolution for standing up to tyranny.

Listening to Lili Li, I began to question my preconceptions about China’s government. If Lili Li, a hero for fighting tyranny and making sacrifices for the country, felt Mao Zedong was not pure evil and had actually done good for the people, what else could the Western media and academia have gotten wrong about China’s leaders and the country overall?

As I spent more time meeting senior officials over the years in informal gatherings, my understanding of the leadership and how its members acted started to change. I found the horrors of the Cultural Revolution were fresh and raw wounds for them, not a long-forgotten stage in history. Many Chinese look at contemporary problems through the lens of the suffering they experienced firsthand.

Being from America, where free speech is bedrock, censorship to me was the hallmark of a brutish yet frightened bureaucracy keeping a viselike grip on power. As I learned more, I realized my lens, having been directed by Western media, had analyzed China too naïvely.

Perhaps government actions that seem thuggish to Western observers are actually protective measures to ensure that the country never faces instability again and that tyrants like Jiang Qing are prevented from rising. Chinese in general are happy because they compare their current lives with the past, and the progress is obvious to them. They look to freer societies like America as a different path, or perhaps the same one but at a different stage of the journey.

• • •

Criticism of Chinese government actions by Western observers often stems from the misconception that the current leadership led the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. The opposite is most likely true because many current leaders and their families suffered the most.

Lili Li’s son Luo Dan, my father-in-law, eventually married the daughter of Marshal Ye Jianying, Ye Xiangzhen, known to some as Lingzi. Marshal Ye was ranked number three in the Party hierarchy during the Cultural Revolution, behind only Mao himself and Wang Hongwen, one of the members of the Gang of Four. Despite Marshal Ye’s power, or perhaps because of it, his children were jailed during the Cultural Revolution, some in solitary confinement.

As soon as Mao died, Marshal Ye led the arrest of the Gang of Four. He acted as the president of the country in the 1980s when he was chairman of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, China’s highest governing body. Deng Xiaoping was another leader at the time; he ranked behind Marshal Ye in the Party chain of command and had also suffered at the hands of tyranny. His son, Deng Pufang, was paralyzed after the Red Guards threw him out of a three-story window at Peking University during the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards denied him medical treatment, which doctors later said might have saved his ability to walk, because his father had been denounced as a capitalist.

Together, Marshal Ye and Deng took charge of China and set the nation on its path toward reform by creating stability and implementing broad-ranging market reforms that gave rise to today’s economic growth. These two prominent political and military figures both suffered during the Cultural Revolution. As with Lili Li, this personal horror shaped their worldview and influenced their families. Ye’s son, Ye Xuanping, who had also been jailed, became the governor of Guangdong and vice chairman of the People’s Political Consultative Congress. One of Ye’s daughters married Zou Jiahua, who became a vice premier. Another daughter married the former chairman of CITIC bank, the state-owned investment giant.

Xi Jinping, then presumed to be China’s next president, also suffered during the Cultural Revolution. He was sent to the countryside for a decade. His father, a former deputy prime minister, was removed from his position and jailed for 16 years.

Personal tragedy during the Cultural Revolution influences the worldview of China’s leaders and citizens. Understanding China’s recent history sheds light on people’s day-to-day choices and optimism and on government actions. Many Western analysts do not underestimate or understand the effects of recent history on contemporary society.

In his recent book, On China, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger analyzes Imperial China to provide a framework for understanding the nation and how America needs to deal with a returning superpower. Others try to use an outdated Confucian framework or a Sun Tzu–based military philosophy to explain the country today. Analyzing the Cultural Revolution, and the personal tragedies suffered during the tumult, is a more useful framework for understanding China’s rise.

• • •

The issue of human rights and how to define them is a major point of contention in U.S.-China relations. Christian groups deem China’s one-child policy evil. Supporters of the Dalai Lama and the World Uighur Congress argue that China suppresses their right of worship. In 2010 Google accused the government of trying to steal its code and stopped offering its search engine services in the Chinese market after it refused to censor itself. Critics denounced the government for blocking access to social media websites like Facebook and Twitter after the Muslim uprising in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, which resulted in more than 1,000 casualties, and after protests in Iran were found to have been organized via social media. In a crackdown at the height of the Arab Spring, the government arrested dissidents like the artist Ai Weiwei, who designed the Bird’s Nest Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and kept Liu Xiaobo in jail even as he became the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Analysts like Elizabeth Economy from the Council on Foreign Relations argue that the government is cracking down because it fears being overthrown, like Mubarak in Egypt. In reality, it is more likely that China’s government is looking at decades of strength. Discontent bubbles up at times, but Economy and other analysts gloss over major differences between contemporary China and the conditions in the Middle East that gave rise to the Arab Spring.

Unlike corrupt regimes in the Arab world, the Chinese government has diffused its power, so one family does not hold too much. This has established a crucial system of checks and balances to prevent totalitarian leadership. Middle Eastern families, like Mubarak’s in Egypt or Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s in Tunisia, were able to rule for decades, but China has strict term limits and retirement ages for even the most powerful officials.

Enforcing retirement ages and distribution of power has allowed for peaceful transitions of power and competing interests within the Communist Party, even as it remains one party. Most senior leaders do not come from the most powerful families; their offspring go into business to cement wealth instead of staying in government like the Mubaraks did to make money. No single person, family, or small group has the power to plunge the country into chaos as Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four did.

Corruption, especially at the local level, remains a concern because it causes dissatisfaction and undermines legitimacy, which is why the new president, Xi Jinping, made cracking down on corruption one of the key pillars of his administration. The crackdown has been deep so far and has chilled the luxury sector, especially alcohol and expensive watches. Chapter 6 will explore how corruption is a problem that needs to be fixed and will discuss how President Xi is correct to try to boot it out of the country, but that dissatisfaction with corruption is not serious enough to cause revolution. There is also no focus on a single ruling family onto which the entire population might vent. They might dislike the system, but with more than 60 million Party members, nearly everyone in the nation has a friend or family member who makes up part of the bureaucracy.

• • •

The government sometimes overreacts to potential threats of instability. To Americans, especially those with a limited knowledge of China, these measures can seem brutish. Critics like Richard Burger, a U.S.-based blogger who lived in China for fewer than three years and who lasted less than a year working for the government mouthpiece newspaper the Global Times, wrote on June 26, 2011, on his blog, The Peking Duck, that the government is “a giant squid, tentacles reaching across the nation to restrict all aspects of life in the land it liberated, silencing opposing voices and existing solely for its own perpetuation. Celebrate away, while people who know real freedom snicker . . . and once again [it has] made a laughingstock of itself.”

Undercutting Burger’s claim that the government is the “giant squid,” the nonpartisan, Washington, DC–based think tank Pew Research Center found in 2009 that 86 percent of the Chinese population supports the direction in which the Chinese government is taking the country. In a 2011 survey of 18 countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) found Chinese are happier overall than any other population, including Americans and the French. My own firm’s survey results echo those of WHO and Pew: Chinese are generally happy with most measures implemented by the government.

If government policies were overly harsh, surely they would not garner such a high rate of support. Even if Chinese disagree with certain rules and take issue with widespread corruption, the Chinese people, as tracked by objective metrics, clearly support the overall direction of their government. Support is high not because people are brainwashed or cowed into submission, but because their interests are mostly aligned with the government’s goals and they see how much better life is than during Jiang Qing’s reign of terror. Bloggers like Burger are cultural imperialists, as defined by Edward Said. Rather than understanding what Chinese people themselves like, they pedantically write off supporters of the government as being apologists, tyrants, or dimwits who just do not know any better.

In 2003 I was sitting in the drawing room of a large Beijing home in one of the main leadership compounds. Next to me was a senior government official, one who is often lambasted in the Western press. His jet-black hair was combed straight back and he wore thick glasses.

We were both peeling oranges and sipping hot green tea. I was apprehensive. If this official was as bad as Western critics made him out to be—and rumors about him abound—he might be pure evil. Undoubtedly he was one of the most powerful people I had ever met. Pictures of visiting heads of state hung on the walls behind him.

“Little Mountain,” he said, calling me by my Chinese name, “you are American. Can you explain to me why the Western press is always criticizing us no matter what we do?” Before I could answer, he continued. He was used to taking charge and being listened to.

He told me about a concert by the Three Tenors, the name given to Spanish singers Plácido Domingo and José Carreras and the Italian singer Luciano Pavarotti, in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Tens of thousands of people attended.

The Forbidden City is one of China’s most important historical places. Emperors lived there. Neighboring it are two of modern China’s symbolic administrative infrastructures—Zhongnanhai, where the top officials of the central government work and live, and Tiananmen Square, which is ringed by the country’s leading museums. Having the concert in the Forbidden City would be equivalent to having one with tens of thousands of attendees on the White House lawn, with the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and the Statue of Liberty all relocated there.

A deranged man with a knife started dashing around Tiananmen Square during the concert, trying to stab people and screaming gibberish, the senior official told me. Like any competent police force, the police tackled the lunatic and took him away in a police van. The official told me a major Western newspaper ran a story covering the incident to the effect of, “Heavily armed riot police in Tiananmen Square, the site of the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 where innocent people were slaughtered and massacred as hulking, brutish soldiers suppressed their drive for freedom of speech, arrested a knife-wielding man who was probably aggrieved by a power-driven government.” The last sentence of the article noted that the reason the man was angry was not confirmed.

The senior official asked whether it was a good idea to have a lot of armed security on such an occasion. Doesn’t it make sense to arrest a clearly mentally disturbed man trying to stab people?

He asked what American police would have done. Probably Taser him or bludgeon him with a club before shackling him with handcuffs and throwing him in the back of a police van, I responded. Nearly a decade later I was proved right, when a New York City policeman pepper-sprayed and manhandled protesters during the Occupy Wall Street protests—yet Western media criticized only that single officer, rather than arguing that the whole political system was complicit.

It obviously pained the senior official to see how China was portrayed in Western media. But he defended his police that day. “Free speech is great, and I want it too, but not if it threatens stability. No one wants to go back to the dark days. Besides, this man was crazy and could have hurt people with his knife.”

At the end of the day in China, freedoms that are perceived to have the potential to bring the country back to the repression and destruction of the Cultural Revolution are not considered to be rights, but rather threats.

Even defining freedoms and the threats against them is not quite so black and white. When Westerners discuss basic human rights, the Chinese government (and, in truth, most Chinese people) thinks about a different set of rights. Take freedom of speech, for example. Most everyday Chinese citizens do not care about measures limiting Internet access, which Americans see as a violation of freedom of access to information. Blocking Facebook or Twitter is not enough to drive mass upheaval because homegrown versions like Tencent’s WeChat, Sina Weibo, or Renren offer equally satisfactory alternatives in Chinese society. The lack of Western alternatives might limit Chinese firms’ ability to expand abroad and employ the Internet tools their competitors use, but it won’t cause massive internal protests.

Many Americans think there has been little progress in China on access to information. This is not true despite the recent setbacks in 2013 when the New York Times and Bloomberg websites were blocked. Before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Huffington Post and the BBC’s website were blocked, but they are now accessible. Around 500 million Chinese actively access the Internet from computers and mobile phones on a daily basis, making it impossible to stop information flow.

The Chinese government is no longer nervous about letting its citizens travel and study abroad or view information and content online. Just a decade ago, by contrast, they severely restricted overseas travel to a privileged few.

Now, the government does cast suspicious glances at Web 2.0 social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as possible tools to foment unrest. True, they might be overly concerned, but even UK Prime Minister David Cameron said during the 2011 London riots he would block and patrol those social media sites being used to stir up violence. There is probably a more elegant solution for China than simply blocking all foreign-run social media sites, but their concerns about how they can be used to foment instability are understandable. Few content sites are blocked today in China, and Chinese can get unfettered access to international news sites that run critical pieces on China’s government, like those of the New York Times, TIME, and The Guardian.

In online chat forums, Chinese people constantly criticize government actions, such as the corruption scandals involving high-speed rail investment and overspending on lavish government buildings. There is no shortage of opinions. If you walk down the street in China, it is even common to see people yelling at police who are trying to ticket them for some driving offense or jaywalking. Many Westerners think that the Chinese people are scared to express themselves and shake with fear when police walk by—but that is simply not true.

The government understands that draconian limits on access to technology would be counterproductive for society, so it has pushed for domestic alternatives like WeChat or microblogging on Sina Weibo instead of Twitter and has even encouraged Chinese police to use these channels to communicate directly with the people. These vehicles provide the Chinese with the freedom of speech the West demands for every citizen of the world. The difference between Sina Weibo and Twitter, however, is largely that the government trusts the executives at Sina to delete within minutes a post that may cause unrest, whereas Western-run sites such as Google or Twitter will not turn over information if the Chinese government legally asks them for it, even though these sites do in America without balking if the Federal Bureau of Investigation provides a warrant.

Younger Chinese might not like curbs on Internet access, or may even think they are silly, but giving up life’s comforts and turning to protest is not in their heads. The benefits that the central government brings far outweigh any negatives. They would rather complain about regulations in person and in online chat rooms, and hope that positive changes will be made as officials get less fearful, than try to overthrow the entire political system.

Given the tribulations of the postdynastic era and the impact of the Cultural Revolution, perhaps most Chinese people understand that a Western model of democracy is not necessarily the best system for China now—and potentially never, as Wu Bangguo, currently chairman and party secretary of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and ranked second in the Party hierarchy, has stated. Chapters 6 and 10 will further explore reforms in the political system and what a future system might entail, but such a system is more likely to be shaped by Chinese voices rather than Western ones.

• • •

Many Westerners view spending on internal stability by the Public Security Bureau to be nefarious—the actions of a Big Brother–like government—yet they do not view the installation of cameras in London, the German government’s use of online Trojans to spy on people, or wiretapping in the United States after 9/11 with such fear or anger. Many Chinese see internal security spending as a natural response to new threats to stability. Sometimes people feel certain steps are excessive and a waste of public funds but are not serious enough to cause mass unrest. They see progress over recent decades and understand that for every two steps forward in the reform process, there is one step back.

China is a developing country, evident by the constant reform that government policies undergo. As the government updates them to reflect current conditions, human rights gradually improve, as they need to. Both noticeable and subtle changes in the right direction can be seen, like the skyscrapers that go up yearly and the right to obtain a passport to travel abroad. The skyscrapers indicate the right to do business, something that was not allowed 40 years ago, and acquiring passports and the ability to travel indicate the right to enter and exit the country as one wishes and to learn what lies beyond China’s borders.

Fifteen years ago, obtaining a passport was difficult. Now you would be hard-pressed to visit any major tourist destination or shopping district in the world without running into scores of middle-class Chinese tourists snapping photos or buying Louis Vuitton bags. In 2013, 113 million Chinese traveled abroad, and Chinese tourists are now the largest per capita spenders when traveling in France and the United States. Contrast this with the situation just several decades ago, when work units dictated marriage, moving within the country was illegal, and divorce was unheard of. For the Chinese people, these freedoms are now all possibilities.

Tangible improvements have created tremendous optimism. People enjoy newfound prosperity and stability, but the Cultural Revolution and its pain are not forgotten, even if it they are not openly talked about. Why dwell on negatives when there are so many positives? They are not blind to the problems plaguing the country today, like corruption, pollution, or income disparities. They do not forgive them either, and they constantly pressure the government to address issues more effectively, such as when the food and high-speed train scandals became public. At some point, a deeper analysis of what went wrong during the Cultural Revolution will be needed to ensure that history is not repeated, but for now the wounds and scars are still too raw. Already in 2013 some former Red Guards like Chen Xiaolu, son of former Foreign Minister Chen Yi, made public apologies for their actions during the Cultural Revolution and is hearkening more discourse on the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution.

Seeing improvements on a day-to-day basis leads Chinese to strive to improve their own lives alongside their country and to focus on making money. The drive for wealth is a major reason fewer are willing to toil in factories or sell their bodies. They aspire to reach higher social classes, make money, buy quality premium brands, and make a better life for their families. They want the Chinese version of the American dream.

As Chinese people prosper and a stable China grows more important on the world stage, understanding how China’s recent history, and experiences like Lili Li’s, continue to shape society today and in the future will help us understand what kind of China is emerging and how it will disrupt the world and allow foreign businesses and governments to react in time to be on the right side of this development.

I wanted to better understand just how widespread optimism was in China and how that optimism manifests itself, both in consumption patterns and in family dynamics, so I decided to look deeper into the role of the segment of society that is least understood by Westerners but that is also the most optimistic part of the population: Chinese women.