by Han Han
So, as I say, our government is fortunate to have a population that is so simple and kind-hearted and so easy to satisfy. Although they have many gripes, they also have a basic level of trust. Occasionally they may stir up a fuss, but at the most that’s because you originally promised to let them have a meat bun if they gave you all their cake, and then you only actually give them a plain bun. All you need to do is pick up a toothpick and dislodge a shred of meat from between your molars to give them as filling for their bun, and they will go home quite contentedly. When dealing with the populace, I really wish the government could forget all the hoopla surrounding GDP and be a bit more accommodating. At your meetings, please recite fewer of those elegantly phrased epigrams and allocate everyone a bigger bowl of soup, subject people to less pressure in their lives, protect them, look out for them, and let them have a little dignity of their own, rather than letting dignity reside only with a notice from the New China News Agency. If you let such a wonderful people die of starvation or illness or poverty or despair or air pollution or toxic food products or rage or mistreatment or contaminated water, or “sleep,” wherever are you are going to find another population?
Letters from strangers
April 4, 2010
Ever since a newspaper article provided independent travelers with directions to my hometown, a number of visitors have managed to find their way there, and sometimes they bring little gifts or drop off a few pictures. But recently people have been delivering letters—with messages that leave me feeling helpless and distressed.
In Imperial China, when ordinary people suffered injustice at the hands of local officials, they would go to the capital to complain directly to the pinnacle of power. The lucky ones might be able to intercept the sedan chair of an official; the most fortunate of all might manage to run into the emperor himself as he traveled about in disguise. These outcomes, however improbable, served psychologically to support society’s yearning for equity and justice. In modern times, leaders have exchanged sedan chairs for luxury automobiles, and trying to stop one of their vehicles would be completely suicidal, and top leaders have so much exposure on television that they can’t possibly go out incognito on inspection tours. Even when they visit the countryside, all that happens is that they go on a photo shoot arranged by the local officials where they conduct a performance in conjunction with some peasant showmen, but that’s all just make-believe—it has next to nothing to do with ordinary folk. These days, the Letters and Visits Office is the only recourse for most people who have been treated unjustly.
Clearly, the people are way too naïve: In a country where the judiciary has no independence, how can you expect that a branch of government will suddenly come to your defense? If another kid slaps you and his mom scolds you and his dad punches you in the face, when you go running to the granddad to complain about his terrible offspring, you should know perfectly well that the best you can hope for is a kick in the shin. Even if that sign in the cavernous lobby of their office building says something to the effect that they’re “here to serve you,” they just put that up there because they think the calligraphy makes a nice fashion statement, and you should never mistake that old saw for their guiding philosophy.
So, once people realize that petitioning for redress not only gets them nowhere but actually amounts to putting their own names on the blacklist and subjecting themselves to more abuse, more and more they begin to turn to the media. Journalists, after all, although hamstrung by all kinds of bans and prohibitions, do have professional ideals and will battle against injustice to the extent that’s possible. In the same way, race car drivers have the goal of driving fast, and actors try to play their parts convincingly, but I’m really unclear what government functionaries see as their professional ideal. Maybe it’s simply to eat and drink to their hearts’ content, to loaf about, to look out for their big break, to trim their sails to the wind, so that in the end they enjoy a smooth ride through officialdom, with the power and position and gray income20 accruing thereto. Precisely because they have no proper professional ideals, they have no professional accomplishments. Basically, in their eyes, petitioners are just troublemakers who fail to show due deference to the big picture.
Many people who have suffered unfair treatment associate me with the media and hope I will take up their cause and write something on their behalf so that their predicament attracts attention. I can do nothing for them, however. Their misfortunes are a heavy burden to them, but possess little news value to the media, and I’m sure that even if I were to write something about it the traditional media wouldn’t pay any attention. But the resolution of an issue very often requires their help; only then will leaders come forth in a big song-and-dance to respond to the people’s needs and identify with their grievances. A common complaint I hear is about the poor quality of housing provided to displaced city residents, with a landfill or a transformer substation just around the corner; another is that people’s houses have been forcibly demolished. But for your home to be demolished without your consent doesn’t count as news—in China, that is life. If you managed to avoid getting burned to a cinder and are still able to send and receive e-mail and all your family members are still alive, that counts as a happy life and you should thank the state for allowing you such a favorable outcome.
The most tragic letter I received was sent from the provinces, with loads of supporting documentation. A family had been forcibly evicted, and some of its members had been injured. Most of their house had been categorized as an illegal building. They went to Beijing to submit an appeal, and the result was that their supporting materials were sent back to the province, and from there to the municipality, and from there to the county, and from there to the village, and thereafter, whenever a national holiday came round, the whole family would be placed under watch by a community policing team, to prevent them from damaging the harmonious atmosphere. In the end they took the case to court and, much to their surprise, the judges agreed to hear it.
When I read that, I was astonished, too. Aren’t the courts simply service organizations for the government? How could they handle this case? I couldn’t wait to turn over the page.
What the next page told me is that the court reached a verdict very quickly: Originally it had been agreed that the government would compensate the victims to the tune of two hundred thousand yuan, but the verdict now was that the government need only pay out one hundred thousand yuan.
The main reason why I can’t give the full details of these cases is that I have not verified all the facts, and that is something beyond my power to do. But I’m confident that the letters are largely, or even entirely, truthful—for, at most, their authors have added a few details to give more weight to their case, without affecting the main facts of the matter—and there’s no question that their adversaries are screwing them over. In the face of these begging letters, I feel entirely powerless. Of course, they are not expecting that I will right all their wrongs—they simply want to explore every possible avenue of redress.
The people who are in the direst need of all most likely are quite unable to appeal. They have appealed to government functionaries, only to find that apart from functionaries there is nobody else who is abusing them. So they appeal to the Communist Party organization, only to find that the organization is made up of functionaries big and small, so then they go looking for the Letters and Visits Office, only to find that this simply facilitates their monitoring by the public security organs, and finally they go to court and pay the fee for filing an appeal, and all along this road they are confronted by hostile forces, so then they try something different: the media, only to discover that there are too many people in equally bad shape and that their own suffering is not sufficiently grave to make news, so then they try the Internet, where they discover that unlucky devils are a dime a dozen and that their own bad luck is not so very unique and has failed to plumb the very lowest depths of human misery. What, then, can they do?
What i
s it you’re so afraid of?
April 17, 2010
Today, through some chat rooms, I heard about the three people who have been sentenced to jail terms in Mawei, Fujian. To be honest, this was complete news to me, so I began a search. First of all I tried Google’s Hong Kong site, only to find that it was just like if you try to search for “carrot” or “plum”—the page simply refused to open.21 So then I tried the Baidu search engine, and all I learned is that these three netizens had been arrested on suspicion of slander. Who was it they slandered? I wondered. If they slandered the local public security agency, I thought, then it’s all over for them. For when they slander the local public security, and their case is then handled by the local courts—well, won’t they have already agreed on the sentence when they all have dinner together in a local restaurant?
In the interests of being fair to all parties, I continued my search for a report on how these three netizens had slandered the government, but the trail soon went cold. First I tried the “Baidu knows the answer” function, only to find that Baidu did not know the answer—of course, it wouldn’t say, even if it knew. So then I tried Sina’s “Sina loves questions” feature, only to find it didn’t appreciate this particular inquiry. But by the end of it all I had a general picture of what had happened. It is actually all too typical a story, and to avoid causing this essay to provoke an allergic reaction I am going to withhold the names of all the people involved.
After a woman’s sudden death, her family suspected she had been gang-raped. They demanded an autopsy, but the coroner’s conclusion was that she had simply died of an illness. The family suspected the police of shielding the perpetrators and demanded a new autopsy, but they were stonewalled by the authorities. Hearing of this incident, three rights activists, concluding that the woman had been raped, circulated the news to chat rooms at home and abroad. The local public security held a news conference where they reiterated that the deceased died from natural causes, and soon after the people responsible for the posts were arrested by the local public security and the three netizens were sentenced to between one and two years in prison.
So that’s basically the story. In terms of the case itself, the key issue is just how the victim died. Having no basis on which to make a judgment, I am in no position to side either with the rights activists or with the government. The government’s view is that if they have made an announcement, then that constitutes proof. The rights activists view is that if they have looked into the case, then that constitutes proof. The questions I would raise are: In the countless disputes of this kind, is the government always in the wrong? Not necessarily. Are the rights activists always right? Not necessarily. But why is it that the government never fails to put itself in the worst possible light?
The local authorities so often have only themselves to blame for incidents like this becoming so fraught. If a person’s death is truly caused by a sudden, catastrophic illness, then they should simply have a credible agency come and do the autopsy, and persuade the family to accept the findings. On the Internet many people are saying that the government urgently needs to set up a clean-government office so as to establish credibility. But I think that such a department is useless. If Hong Kong has very few cases of corruption, that’s not because they have a “clean-government office,” but because clean government is independent. I think that given China’s national circumstances at the moment, it’s not ready to have an independent body on the lines of a clean-government commission—if it were to be established and if it were to take its work seriously, then practically all officials and their relatives would be gone in an instant. The body that China most urgently needs is an independent coroner’s office, one that enjoys independence and commands credibility, one that when necessary can broadcast its examinations live on television. If you think back over the mass protests that have taken place in China over the last few years, so many of them have been triggered by autopsies. The coroner’s office is a key department in upholding social stability, because autopsies these days, no matter whether the results are genuine or faked, command no trust among the people. Although I suspect many autopsy findings are correct, the people are not wrong to be suspicious. A government that first decides the offense and then decides the crime is very likely to find that the people will master the same technique, so we must expect people to jump to the conclusion that their loved ones have been murdered, that the culprit is being shielded, and that the autopsy results have been fabricated. Because, in this society, if you aren’t concerned about evidence, then neither am I, and if you are not transparent, then I’m going to indulge in speculation. And when I speculate, you say I’m engaging in slander, and when I press for an answer, you say this is a state secret, and when I make a big thing out of it, then you . . . then you . . . well, that makes it easy for you—that takes the matter out of your hands, for naturally the relevant authorities will notify the news oversight departments that this incident cannot be reported. However, what you’re burying here is simply the seeds of hate.
Therefore, this incident could very easily have been resolved by the local authorities right from the start. If they had done an absolutely honest autopsy and verified that the victim had died of natural causes, then they could have persuaded the family; and if the autopsy had established that the victim had been murdered, then they could have arrested the culprit. Or, at the minimum, this issue could have been discussed openly, with everyone bringing forward their own evidence as part of the debate. But officialdom has always considered itself above that kind of procedure, for they think this would only lower their prestige. What’s more, our officials always put themselves in a poor light as soon as they open their mouths: You simply never see them earnestly engaging in conversation using the kind of language that we human beings employ to communicate. They always revert to that robotic official jargon to resist ordinary people’s appeals. Music aficionados will agree that tone is crucial, and when someone sings in a tone that you loathe, any song they sing is bound to be crap.
Now, how that girl died is no longer important—what matters is the verdict on those three rights activists. As for the crime of slander, it looks like prison terms are inevitable. Charges like this cannot be explained in legal terms—one needs to understand the outcome in terms of self-interest and established convention, because, to the government, face is so important. They’ve locked you up for all this time now—and on this pretext—and if you were now to be released, although the court may receive plaudits, how is public security going to manage in the future? They are all living in the same town and are bound to run into each other sooner or later, if not in the office then in the sauna, and how awkward that interaction would be. Actually, all these years, everyone has misunderstood the meaning of “the People’s Court”—this doesn’t mean a court that is of the people and for the people, what it means is a court that only makes itself responsible for resolving contradictions among the people, not between the people and government agencies.
Now that these three rights activists have been sentenced to a year or two in jail, many netizens think a dark age for the Internet is about to arrive, that rights activists are going to get brought in for retaliatory sanctions, that critical commentary posted on the Internet is going to be prohibited and punished, that freedom of speech is going to completely disappear. But given that we’re dealing with law enforcement in a small county town, I think it’s a mistake to attribute to these people such profound motives. When it comes down to it, this incident has only one meaning and conveys only one message, namely: See what we’re capable of doing.
All right, you want to show us what you’re capable of, and we’ve seen and we’re afraid, but what we don’t understand is—what is it you’re so afraid of?
Yes, do come! Yes, do go!
April 19, 2010
Recently reporters have been bombarding me with requests for interviews about the Shanghai Expo. This puts me in a difficult spot, because if I sing its praises my c
onscience won’t rest easy, and if I find fault with it I won’t be allowed to sleep easy. Since the expo is about to begin, I herewith provide answers to all the standard questions; please spare me any more inquiries.
What do you think the expo will bring to Shanghai and to China? What would you compare it to?
It’s not a question, I think, of what the expo brings to China, but of what China brings to the expo. Because expos originally were never such big events, as information circulates more and more rapidly, the idea of the expo is increasingly outdated. It’s China that has elevated the expo to a new level. If you really want an analogy, it’s a bit like some international brand that’s really popular in China—with all the hype it gets, when you are wearing one of those outfits you think you are occupying the pinnacle of fashion and enjoying the ultimate in luxury, but then when you ask about it abroad, you find that it’s second string.
What do you think of the expo mascot—Haibao?
I think Haibao is a real pain. Setting aside the question of whether it’s an attractive—or an original—design, the version of it we first saw was flat, and that has been the source of great difficulty for people trying to make it three-dimensional. Just what should his rear end look like? Does he have a tail? Does he have an ass? Does his ass have cleavage? This is very unclear. So when we look at the figures of Haibao that have been erected around the city, their front view is identical but the rear varies.