This Generation

by Han Han

  I saw somewhere a neat description of that phenomenon, and the gist of it was: A man gets into his car and immediately activates the right-turn indicator, drives forward a few yards, only to turn left. That wouldn’t be so bad, but then he makes a complete U-turn. So, if you’re run over by this kind of driver, you can only curse your bad luck.

  When a journalist ferrets out the truth, when a history teacher lectures on the patterns of the past, when a writer presents things honestly, when a film director depicts real life, at best they will have committed an ideological error and at worst they will have perpetrated a crime. And when someone offends in this fashion, others will indulge in speculation: He has been “invited out for a coffee,” he has been banned, he has been arrested, when actually in the end he may not get into so much trouble and all that may happen is that the evidence of his crime is purged from view, but people still don’t feel relaxed—rather, they feel all the more anxious on their own account, suspecting that it’s only because the guy is quite famous that the government has hesitated to take action—maybe the government won’t have any scruples about taking action against me? It has to have taken a lot of reinforcement to build up that level of instinctive anxiety.

  In any era, even when brainwashing becomes as routine as washing vegetables, there are bound to be a few scallions that don’t get rinsed clean. In the old days people would have hacked away and discarded those dirty leaves, but with the changing of the guard these unclean scallions are asked simply to keep to themselves as they grow. However, if they try to share their thoughts with the other onions, they will be immediately be squashed flat by the ones who insist on playing dumb.

  Many people think that the subtext of the Fujian initiative is that recently some history teachers and university professors have been a bit too vocal, and of course I’ve seen in today’s news that the history teacher Yuan Tengfei has been investigated—along with the Heaven on Earth Night Club—but I doubt that the two things are linked. When the Sensitive Council has not yet shown its hand, the government is not going to respond so rapidly nor are the various departments going to coordinate so seamlessly. It’s just a coincidence, a routine decree from an educational department. Some kind of decree like this governs all professions in China—it’s simply that the precise language may take different forms. In the same way, all raffles share a common principle: The authority to interpret the rules rests with the sponsoring body. And I don’t propose to discuss the question of who has the power to decide whether someone else’s thought is correct or incorrect, for that topic is meaningless, since the answer is obvious. Who has the power? It’s the people in power, of course, who have that power. Everything that bolsters their interests and their power is, of course, correct, and everything not conducive to promoting their interests and enhancing their power is naturally incorrect. As soon as you have grasped that principle, you’ll never have to tie yourself into knots wondering what is right and what is wrong.

  As for you history teachers, literature teachers, and politics teachers, what kind of role do you think you will play and what kind of verdict do you think will be passed on you in the textbooks of the future? Perhaps you are simply a vegetable that is not in charge of its own affairs, but your students are your seedlings. Try to be real teachers, imparting to your students common sense and reflection, independence and a sense of justice, so that in your old age, when you tell your grandchildren you once served in this profession, you will feel a surge of pride rather than be stricken with shame.

  Youth

  May 28, 2010

  A high school friend of mine had no great aspirations, but was healthy and eager to work. After a long search, he landed a job in an assembly plant, for a salary of one thousand five hundred yuan a month. Often he would work overtime, which sometimes was paid and sometimes was not, for a total of two thousand yuan a month. He lived six or seven miles away from his workplace, so he bought a scooter, leaving home early and coming home late. Recently married, he couldn’t afford to buy a house. Fortunately, his parents did have some rental income: Like other families in his home village, they built a three-story house and rented out the first and second floor to migrant laborers—six rooms at two hundred fifty yuan rent each, bringing in an extra monthly income of one thousand five hundred yuan. Those out-of-towners typically lived as a family, three to a room, each of them earning a bit over eight hundred yuan a month, walking or cycling to local factories. These factories, set up by investors from elsewhere, manufactured chemical products and polluted more heavily than the assembly plants. Most of them have now closed down. The few that remain are able to turn a slight profit, but if they were to clean up their act and reduce emissions, that would put them in the red, and if that happened they wouldn’t be able to pay taxes and make a contribution to GDP, so the local government can’t afford to enforce regulations.

  My friend feels he’s not done so badly—he’s found a wife, anyway—but pretty much all his income is spent just on basic subsistence and any major purchase is out of the question. He doesn’t dare change his job or head off to some other region to try his luck, in part because there is no social safety net, and if by chance something happened and he missed out on a month’s wages, there would just be no way to carry on. Looking ahead to the birth of a child, he and his wife would like to buy a house in the town and acquire an urban residence permit, but an apartment in one of the satellite towns near Shanghai costs at least half a million yuan. For that, he would need to work without eating and drinking for twenty-five years, and what he’ll get for that is just the basic shell of an apartment—he’d need to go hungry for another five years to get it properly fixed up.

  His next-door neighbor, another friend of mine, has just graduated from university and gets paid a bit more. But his girlfriend has higher expectations: She won’t marry him until he has a house in the city. An older city apartment costs at least two million yuan, so my friend needs to work for sixty years—or his family needs to rent out their house to eight migrant-worker families for a hundred years—before he can afford to buy it. So all they can hope for is forced relocation. Even if the government purchases their house for half a million and then sells off the land for five million, they’re not going to protest, for the half million can cover the down payment on an apartment in the city. How they manage in the future remains to be seen, but at least this way he would be able to marry. As for where his parents will live after the house is demolished, that’s certainly an issue, but maybe they’d be able to rent a reasonably sized room in another local’s house for three hundred yuan or so, as an interim arrangement.

  My first friend’s previous job involved rotating shifts and the factory was far from his home; he developed health problems and resigned the job to take his current position, hoping for less overtime and higher pay; his employer indicated he would get a raise of one hundred yuan this year and another one hundred yuan next year. Last week he told me that his father is probably going to get a job abroad as a bricklayer: If he works abroad for three years, he should make two hundred thousand yuan. I asked him what his plan was, and he said he’d just carry on as he was doing—what other choice is there? His mother is screwing in light bulbs for eight hundred yuan a month. This young man in his twenties is looking at his own future thirty years from now: a father in his fifties who has to go abroad to work for two years. This family in the outskirts of Shanghai dislikes the migrant laborers, for they compete for jobs in the local factories and have driven down salaries to just a few hundred yuan a month, and the ratio of outsiders to locals in the areas is now over ten to one. At the same time, they have no choice but to depend on them, because they pay over ten thousand yuan in rent each year.

  Such is the life of ordinary folk in the outskirts of Shanghai, and this family might actually be doing pretty well. It’s situations like this that have led so many employees at Foxconn to throw themselves off buildings: repetitive work, very low wages, a hopeless future.28 But if they go somewhe
re else, wages will be even lower. The cost of living is high: Though they won’t go hungry or suffer cold, there’s nothing else they can do. And giving them enough to eat is presented by the government as a huge achievement, a notable contribution to the world and to humanity. How the authorities wish they could get their hands on the archives of prehistory or photographs of the Ice Age, for that would really show what a big debt the people owe to the government! Since just having enough to eat is such an accomplishment, how could people possibly have higher goals than that? Although my friend is under a lot of pressure, at least his friends and family are close by. But for the vast majority of young migrant workers, their families are a thousand miles away or more, and their families may well not treat them with much affection, for how much you earn is commonly the sole criterion Chinese families have for determining the value of a child.

  These young workers represent a sector of society unfamiliar to most Internet users. It’s rare to find chat rooms where current employees of Foxconn tell stories about the suicides of their coworkers or talk about their own lives, for they don’t have time to do those things and may not even know how. The garish, self-indulgent life outside has nothing to do with them, and they have no hopes of love, either, given the reality of their existence. Maybe only when they throw themselves off the roof does the value of their lives find some expression, when their having once existed is briefly mentioned and remembered, although now they have become only a statistic.

  Psychological counseling is useless. When they see our women cuddling the rich, and the rich cuddling the officials, and the officials cuddling the bosses, and the bosses cuddling Lin Chi-ling,29 how are you going to give them psychological counseling? If I make inquiries, I find that my former classmates are all struggling. If there are men who are doing okay, it’s because they depend on their parents, and if there are women who are doing okay, it’s because they have married well. Everyone envies your benefits at Foxconn: wages issued on time, accommodation provided, and overtime with pay. You tell people you’re a robot, but those people say they’re just a pile of shit. In an area of several hundred square kilometers, there’s not a single realistic rags-to-riches story to tell: Such is the life of so many Chinese youth.

  If the Foxconn workers were paid ten times what they are now, would the suicides stop? So long as inflation isn’t ten times what it is now, then yes—the suicides would cease. Of course, their employer would never raise their pay that much—and if they did, the government would issue an edict forbidding it. Why have our politicians been able to pump up their chests on the world political stage and make some political moves and play some political tricks? It’s because of you, China’s cheap labor: you are China’s gambling chips, hostages to GDP. Whether it is socialism with Chinese characteristics or capitalism with feudal characteristics, in the next ten years there is no way out for these young people. This is so sad: warm blood that should be coursing through veins—spilled on the ground, instead.

  Orphan of Asia

  June 24, 2010

  Orphan of Asia was originally the title of a 1945 novel by the Taiwanese author Wu Zhuoliu, written during the Japanese occupation; the book describes the tragic predicament of a Taiwanese intellectual who is mistreated by the Japanese but also discriminated against in China. Later, the name was applied to a detachment of the Chinese Nationalist Army stranded in the border area of southwest China; their story formed the basis for a Hong Kong feature film. Luo Dayou wrote a song for that movie, which was set in the region of Yunnan, Burma, and Laos, although he was no doubt also thinking of Taiwan’s isolation at the time. One of those places is now one of Asia’s problem children, but the others are among Asia’s promising youngsters; the true orphan of Asia is North Korea.

  Last week I watched Brazil play North Korea in the World Cup, a match I had been looking forward to for a long time, in part because I like South American soccer, in part because North Korea is just so mysterious. “Do you think the Korean players will be shot when they get home,” I joked with my friends, “because they have had a chance to see the world?” After watching the first half, another thought occurred to me. “North Korea actually has always been good enough to reach the finals,” I said, “it’s just that the past few World Cup finals have been held in developed countries, so it wasn’t convenient for them to progress beyond the qualifying round. This time the finals are in South Africa, where there’s a huge gap between rich and poor, so the North Korean government took their team and dumped them in a South African shanty town and said, ‘See, this is how you live when you don’t have socialism.’ Generalissimo Kim Jung-il had decided it was all right for them to take part.”

  In this first match the North Korean team played stylish soccer and were very sportsmanlike as well: No playacting or pushing and shoving, and if they fell down they were back on their feet right away. Whether out of sympathy for the underdog or out of solidarity with other Asians, I was touched by their performance. And when they finally scored a goal, I was delighted—although I did remind my friends that just because they like the Korean players and the Korean people they shouldn’t take things any further and start liking Kim Jung-il and the dominant ideology there. When it came to the second match, many people quite fancied North Korea’s chances, thinking they might well upset Portugal. But experience tells us that with this kind of country, whatever the setting, once things start to go wrong the whole place is likely to fall apart. When North Korea was thrashed 7–0, my friends began to worry once more about the fate of the team when they got back home.

  As a neighbor of ours, North Korea has always been a pain in the neck. A lot of people take the simplistic view that North Korea is bound to be our friend forever, since our two states pledge allegiance to the same belief system, but this is a strange way of looking at things—a bit like saying that just because we’re both Argentina fans, then we have to be friends too. Of course, in the end everyone’s realized we’re actually fake Argentina fans, but fake in different ways. Others take the naïve view that if there’s another war we will have to come to North Korea’s aid, because we can’t have a capitalist country right there on our doorstep and because we made huge sacrifices to defend North Korea the first time round. That’s an odd position to take, too, for who can say that two bosom pals will never have a falling out, and there’s no guarantee that the North Korean people really thank us for what we did, in any case. And if war did break out between North and South Korea, the North might well lob a few nuclear warheads at the South but end up getting beaten anyway, and the following might happen: With South Korean territory affected by nuclear radiation, the two sides might switch ends—just like halfway through a soccer match—and we’d have South Korea on the north side of the thirty-eighth parallel for a change. Actually, it’s not important what ideology is supported by the countries adjacent to us, for that’s not a major issue in contemporary warfare—what matters is whether our neighbors are civilized, and whether we are.

  North Korea has abundant natural resources, a population proportionate to the country’s size, and a commendable national spirit; for it to be reduced to its current level of poverty has to count as quite an achievement. Some people attribute North Korea’s problems to the sanctions imposed by the international community, particularly the United States, but I’m not sure they truly understand the country. Of course, I can’t claim to truly understand the country either, but in an age when information is so widely available, if a country is so difficult to get to know and if its citizens have even more difficulty getting to know the rest of the world—or risk being shot if they try—then it is bound to be poor. The less access to information, the more backward the economy—that is inevitable. What’s ironic is that this extremely autocratic nation that does everything it can to brainwash its people calls itself the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” just as the bloody and dictatorial red regime in Cambodia in the 1970s, which in just four years caused the death of a fifth of its popula
tion, called itself “Democratic Kampuchea.” It’s only when they recite the complete name of their country, I bet, that the people of North Korea ever have the chance to mention the word democracy.

  We can’t interfere in other countries’ internal politics and we can’t comment on our own—all we can do is comment on the former. Like a straggler looking back sympathetically at someone trailing even further behind, I always keep hoping that North Korea can join the world, can stop being Asia’s orphan, even if it doesn’t do any better than us. Here in China we’re always ambivalent about how far to go: heading right, then veering left; one hand waving, one hand clenched; pressing forward, then pushing back; steering west and talking east; but at least we’re part of the world, at least we’re never again going to perform a loyalty dance, tears welling up in our eyes as we fondle the leader’s portrait. For everyone to submit to the authority of one person or one view can never be the standard by which one determines the success of a state or a regime. Actually, when we look at it now, all that fuss we used to make about this class or that, about the correct outlook and the right banner, it was all just a game or all just a dream. Forty or fifty years ago, we were always getting in a tizzy about which class was going to have power, but in fact that’s not the issue at all, for any group of people who get power will inevitably become a new class—there is no evidence to show they will naturally and inevitably uphold the interests of the class to which they originally belonged. No matter what class you identify with, no matter what kind of thinker you are, or politician, or military strategist, working out how to get power is not such a towering achievement—it’s the one who works out how to limit power who is truly great.