by Han Han
Why can’t our country progress? It’s because so many of our officials consistently judge themselves by the standard of the Mao or the Stalin era, and so they always feel aggrieved: In their eyes, they’re so enlightened, so just, so generous, so unassuming—and that’s a tremendous achievement! It’s not that technological advances are pushing society forward, they think—no, it’s all because of their conscious decision to open things up. So the more you criticize them, the more they long for absolute power, the more you mock, the more they want to be Mao.
“You’re just never satisfied,” an official told me. “A literary type like you—if you’d been around forty years ago, you’d have been shot. That’s a sign of progress, no?”
“You’re the ones who’re never satisfied,” I said. “If you’d expressed that kind of view ninety years ago, you’d have been laughed off the streets.” Are we really seeing progress here?
Yes, an accident did happen, they concede, but the top leadership expressed its concern. We also sent someone to answer you reporters’ questions. The original compensation was set at one hundred seventy thousand yuan, and now it has been raised to five hundred thousand, and we even sacked one of our best buddies. We really went the extra mile, so why do you keep harping on about little details, why don’t you lighten up a bit? How come you’ve lost your sense of the big picture? Why do you want us to apologize? We have committed no crime—an accident like this is just the price you pay when you develop. Disposing of the bodies so rapidly—well, that’s just standard operating procedure; early signing-off on the death certificate leads to a bigger bonus, late signing-off leads to less compensation—that’s the method our sister department found so effective when conducting forcible demolition and resettlement. To bury the train carriages was a poor decision, yes, but it came from higher up, because they wanted any potential source of trouble hidden on the spot. The mistake we made was to do the job in broad daylight and make too big a hole, and we didn’t communicate adequately with the propaganda department or fully control the photographers in the area, so our preparatory work was a bit rushed. The biggest lesson we learned from this accident is that in the future when burying things we need to take their size into account and also the secrecy of the work. These things we underestimated.
But generally speaking, they feel, the rescue operation was successful and timely. Deployment of resources was reasonable, the overall plan was normal, and the handling of the aftermath was satisfactory. The only unfortunate aspect was that public opinion got a bit out of control. But that’s not our responsibility, they feel—public opinion is not under our control.
If you look at the big things, they think, we held the Olympics, we eliminated taxes on farmers, but you don’t give us credit for all that stuff, you’re always picking on little details here and there—just what are you getting at? We could easily have been more repressive politically than North Korea, more impoverished economically than Sudan, more ruthless organizationally than the Khmer Rouge, because we have a bigger army than all of them put together, but we didn’t do things that way. Not only are you not grateful, but you want us to apologize. We feel so misused.
In this nation of ours, everybody feels aggrieved—the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless alike. In a nation where everyone feels aggrieved, the various strata of society all become disconnected from each other and every component part of this huge country just keeps coasting on, carried along by its inbuilt momentum. Without reform, we’ll find that disconnection is not our biggest problem—it’s going off the rails that we need to worry about.
What do you do if it’s too downbeat?
November 2, 2011
This is the first time I’ve written anything since “The Disconnected Nation” was erased from my blog. I’m not the most diligent author in the first place, and when I post something one day and it is gone the next, it really puts a damper on my mood. Sometimes you can’t help feeling you have all the cards stacked against you: There’s such a multiplicity of government departments that even if the propaganda department and the news publication department think there’s no problem, any other department equipped with a level of sedan higher than a Volkswagen Passat can get rid of an essay with a single telephone call. The most restrained of them has to be the provincial public security department that waited a whole year to delete an essay I had posted back in 2008. No wonder people are always saying that public security takes its time about responding to complaints! When there are so many agencies with the power to shut you up, it’s a real brainteaser to work out how to write anything at all.
After engaging in this line of work for some thirteen years now, I realize that creative artists, in terms of the status they hold, are a useless, pathetic bunch. Because of all the limitations placed on the fruits of their labor, there’s no way they can come out with their best work.
In the Chinese publishing industry, there’s actually no official censorship. This may come as a big surprise to you, because it flies in the face of common sense. But every year hundreds of thousands of books are published in China, and there’s no way they can all be inspected. And I’m sure that most of the comrades who make it their business to keep an eye on writers don’t actually care much for reading, so in practice censorship is something that the publishing houses themselves attend to, in the form of retrospective censorship. This is even more of a jolt to the system than preemptive censorship—a blunter instrument, with more negative effects. Friends who have resorted to morning-after contraceptives will surely know what I mean.
But you need a book number to be able to publish, and only publishing houses can issue book numbers, and only with official approval can you have a publishing house, so from the very start it’s impossible to have free publishing in China. Since many state-owned publishing houses are in poor shape, independent companies have begun to get involved in publishing, either in partnership with state-owned companies or by buying book numbers from other publishers. But this does not alter the status quo, because the publisher remains the final inspection agency. In the past, if a book could not be published, the justification given was that it was counterrevolutionary. Later, the word counterrevolutionary dropped out of use, because if to be counterrevolutionary is something bad, that would seem to encourage revolution. But the official view, of course, is that the work of revolution is already finished, so although we certainly don’t want counterrevolution, we can’t have revolution, either—the best outcome is that things just stay as they are. So, the reason we are given these days for a book being banned is that it’s too downbeat. My first book, Triple Door, for instance, took forever to be published because it was too downbeat. Downbeat is a fatal flaw, because you can always revise something that’s a bit sloppy or straighten out the kinks in a ropey argument. But that which is downbeat gives you a real headache, because you’ve got no idea how to make the downbeat go up. If you ask the publisher what he means by downbeat, he doesn’t know, either, and it’s only now I realize that what downbeat means is “beat down.”
I have always suffered at the hands of censorship. But when I up my beat a little, with a bit of luck I can publish my work, and because it sells well I can sometimes manage to get the publisher’s permission to be a bit more downbeat on some minor points here and there. Every time I write, I first have to engage in some self-censorship. People who’ve never engaged in this line of work tend to feel that we’re too wimpy, that we don’t have enough spunk. When I ran into a lot of difficulties trying to publish the magazine Party, for example, some friends lost patience with me. “You’re such a dork,” they said. “If it was me, I wouldn’t ask for a number, I’d just take the files down to the printers and print a couple of hundred thousand copies right there, and put them on the market.” I admire their gumption, but what they don’t realize is that the printer won’t start the press rolling until they get authorization from the publisher. Without that clearance, not only will you be unable to print a single copy, bu
t you’ll also be having a tête-à-tête with the police before you know it. Even if your dad runs a printing press and you get him to run off two hundred thousand copies, you still don’t have a book number, so no bookstore or newspaper kiosk will accept your stuff—not even the ones that are comfortable selling pirated goods. “Well, then,” you say, “I’ll put it up on the web, I’ll sell it on Taobao.” Well, I’ll tell you, if you want to sell books on Taobao, first of all you need to have the finances, and secondly you can’t just display the cover and start selling the book right away—you need to tap in the book number, and it’s only when the system matches your book number and the book title that you can post things for sale.
So now, as in the past, writers have to grit their teeth and censor themselves. Can we perhaps hope to find a publishing house that might be willing to lower its tone? No, that’s not in the cards at all. A publishing house is a state-owned enterprise, and as soon as it shows signs of lowering its tone all the government needs to do is assign a new executive to run it, while the comrades who lowered the tone end their days in the All-China’s Women’s Federation or the China Disabled Persons’ Federation. The most awful element in retrospective censorship is the punishment phase: I’m not going to interfere, but if you dare to publish something shady, I’ll see that you suffer. If I’m in a good mood I’ll see you lose your job and get kicked out of the company altogether, and if I’m in a bad mood then I’ll throw you in jail—so do as you think best.
In my own case, although every essay has undergone self-censorship and emasculation, inevitably it sometimes happens that even in this bowdlerized form it still fails to pass muster and inflicts too much stress on the publishing house. My latest novel, for example, got the thumbs down, because its protagonist is surnamed Hu. Even if I’ve only written five thousand words so far, the publisher is convinced it must be a political allegory. When I realized I should have avoided this taboo, it was already too late. But in observing taboos you can’t afford to forget previous leaders. In another one of my novels, because I wrote a phrase in which both the characters Jiang and Hu appeared, it was shot down all the more quickly, for this was doubly offensive.
What a fool I am—I know I can’t afford to upset these people, so why couldn’t I keep out of their way? I don’t know how a country where a writer starts shaking as soon as he picks up his pen can become a cultural powerhouse, or how a country where one can’t find the Tang poet Li Bai on Google because his name infringes on the name of a Politburo Standing Committee member can become a cultural powerhouse, either.41 I have no clue how to go about reforming our cultural system, and have one simple wish—that Han Zheng, the mayor of Shanghai, won’t climb any higher in the bureaucracy. If he does, I won’t be able to Google myself.
We already had our say on that
November 16, 2011
I have been keeping a blog now for six or seven years, and even though I have been far from assiduous in updating it I find that I’ve now written several hundred posts in all. But as time has gone on a good half of Chinese bloggers have transferred their attention to social networking sites, while the other half have become converts to microblogs of one kind or another. For the past year or so, the links on the left of my screen have been left unattended—it’s not just a case of tea going cold when someone leaves, for the tea has completely dried up, leaving only the cup itself. Most of those former bloggers have probably already forgotten their own username and password. But I like it better this way. It’s as though a bunch of people suddenly came crowding in, doing the same thing as you, then left again just as suddenly. You don’t feel lonely when they’re gone—it just seems tidier.
“Why don’t you have a microblog?” people ask. Actually, I did do one for a few days, but soon came to feel it didn’t suit me, so I closed down the account. It’s not that I found the 140-character limit too restrictive, for who would insist on always writing an essay ten times that length? A regular essay requires quite a bit of thought, whereas with a microblog post just three or four neatly put sentences are all that’s needed. On days when you can’t think of anything to say, you can make do just by forwarding other people’s posts. What I found was that after about a week of microblogging a change seemed to have come over me. First of all, I couldn’t help constantly checking how many times my posts had been forwarded and how many new fans I had and how many people had made a positive or negative comment on something I had written. The person who bad-mouthed me has an officially verified account—what’s their background, I wonder. This one who praised me has a picture and is really quite a looker—I wonder where she lives? Hey, she’s really cute—how about if I put a “Follows” tag on her—that way she’s bound to respond by sending me a personal message, and after a bit of back and forth we can set up a date or something. Oh, what a tragic story here! That’s just terrible. I don’t have too much to say about it, but I’ll forward a note deploring what happened, and that should satisfy my readers’ expectations—I am supposed to be the scourge of all evil, after all. Hey, that pretty girl has sent me a message, so now I’m going to have a look at her web page and get a sense of her lifestyle, but I mustn’t get carried away. Oh, and now a friend wants me to pass on the news that he has a new book out. Hey, that tragedy now turns out to be just fake news—shit, it sounded so convincing. Wow, so many people are singing my praises, I’ll send off a note thanking them. Right, this guy thinks I’m cool, too, and he’s got a good brain and good looks, so I maybe shouldn’t leave a comment after his, but rather forward his comment and then express appreciation, so that way even more people will see how he praised me—that’s doesn’t count as shameless, after all, since it leaves everyone happy. Oh, it looks like that tragedy really did happen—Sina has confirmed it, so I better hurry up and make a quick comment on it—if it turns out to be fake news then I can blame it on Sina. Oh, here’s another tragic story, I’ll forward it—hey, hang on, if I forward it, maybe that means the guy who sent it to me gets the credit, so perhaps I should rephrase things and say at the start: “I just read this story about something that happened in XX City. . . .” Wouldn’t that be better for my figures? And it would also show I don’t spend the whole day updating my microblog. Damn it, how can I be thinking that way? Forget it, it’s time for bed.
Okay, time to get up. Let’s have a look at the comments and update the news. Oh, and don’t forget the personal messages. So many newly added followers—no way I can look at them all. Hey, this starlet is a follower, and I have a crush on her. Why don’t I flirt with her a bit in a personal message? She wrote a whole post about me in her microblog, so why don’t I shoot off a reply to further tickle her interest? Hmm, who is this guy—I think I’ve seen him somewhere. Let’s read this stuff about him. Wow, his company is huge. Oh no, this little girl got terribly burned in that fire, how awful! Better forward that, and donate some money. Maybe I should be writing some insight into life, but I don’t seem to have got any new insight into life recently! But shit, I’ve been at this game for so many years now, I shouldn’t have any trouble coming up with some surefire chicken soup for the soul, even if I can’t stand those pretentious soul-counselors. Now I’ve got to go out and do one or two things, but in my spare moments I’ll still be able to check my microblog. My friend texts me to tell me he used to know that chick I have my eye on—that’s good, I’ll make some roundabout inquiries to try to find out how she’s placed. Oh, she’s married! Damn it, on her microblog she comes across as a lonely single. Okay, so I’ll just have a look at my friend’s microblog. What, he’s forwarded a post about saving dogs transported on the freeway, pleading with everyone to rescue those golden retrievers. Damn it, it wasn’t long ago that he ate the family dog for extra energy in the winter!
That’s right, writing these things on a microblog makes me feel good, for I am vain and sometimes even a bit hypocritical. As I achieve more in life, I can pretend to be less and less vain, since I have more reason to think highly of myself. But I rema
in vain internally. To opt out of attending awards ceremonies or upper-crust events is actually just another form of vanity, rather than genuine detachment. After keeping a blog for years now, I’m not easily distracted by people’s comments or expectations. But if I keep a microblog for a few days I find myself immersed in a heroic fantasy world. Of course, maybe it’s just me who acts that way. Maybe everyone else can write without a second thought, dash things off effortlessly and maintain their composure while displaying their art, without all the second-guessing that I do. But I felt an unhealthy state of mind was affecting me, so I decided to close down my microblog. If you’re not a writer, on the other hand, a microblog might be a good way to spice up your life and unveil a better version of yourself.
Microblogs have altered the form and speed with which information is transmitted and have complicated efforts to block it. In reality, of course, it is the Internet that has changed everything, and it’s a variety of products that have made communication that much more convenient. I have an alternative online pseudonym that I use regularly to sign in and see what’s going on. Actually there’s no real difference from before—it’s just less trouble to access. I used to get my news from the papers, and I might have to look at twenty newspapers; later I would sign into chat rooms—four or five of them; and now we have microblogs, and so long as I follow enough people’s microblogs and they are all to my liking, then all I need is a single account. Although more scandals are publicized than before, the issues go away all the more quickly. When you read the papers, a month or two after an event you still see follow-up, in-depth reports. When I was in middle school, I was under the impression that if a scandal was uncovered it would be a topic of discussion for months. Later, twelve years ago, when I began to join online discussions, I realized just how many things I had been in the dark about before. Now, when you access microblogs you hear about even more things, but unless an event is really tragic, something that is news in the morning will have disappeared from view in the afternoon, and you need to do an online search to find any trace of it. But what I have learned is that, through all this time, I have remained pretty much the same person I was before, and I don’t seem to have affected the people around me, who just carry on with their own concerns and interests. I don’t think it’s the case that my essays have influenced readers’ tastes; rather, they have simply been consumed by readers who share the same tastes.