by Liu Xiaobo
Every time I talk with the “inside the system” people I come away feeling that each aspires to the great role of a Gorbachev, has the mettle to suffer in silence for the common good, and commands much political wisdom. Perhaps my mind is too contaminated by all those revolutionary films I watched when I was young, but I still tend to see these people as brilliant underground operatives.
The phenomenon is not limited to officialdom; it is found in the worlds of media, education, culture, and the economy as well. A number of acquaintances of mine from the days of the 1989 protests went into business and got rich after the massacre; now, after the passage of a decent interval, they have been inviting me to join them at sumptuous banquets. At these occasions they speak expansively about the great affairs of the world and swear that they by no means went into business just to get rich. They wanted to make a difference in the world. They enumerate the ways in which their moneymaking is good for Chinese society: (1) it contributes directly to the processes of marketization and privatization, which are the most basic economic building blocks for the political democratization to come; (2) it allows them to help friends who are in dire need, and at the same time to provide economic resources that people outside the system can use to return to the political stage (they are most fond of saying that a revolution needs money, and they are now making as much money as possible for that reason); (3) above all, they hold that a revolution done by rich people inevitably will be the least costly of revolutions, because the market has taught such people—themselves—how to make good cost–benefit calculations. The new revolution will not, like Mao’s, incur huge costs while bringing few benefits. With wealthy people in charge, they argue, the chances of violent revolution are minimized and the chances for gradual, peaceful evolution are greatest.
For these reasons they are not entirely opposed to the vacuous watchwords of recent leaders, such as Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” (that the Communist Party represents advanced productivity, advanced culture, and the people’s interests) or Hu Jintao’s “New Three Principles of the People” (that the people enjoy their rights, the Party seeks the people’s benefit, and the Party’s concern is for the people). These nostrums, in their view, are at least better than Mao Zedong’s violent revolutionism or Deng Xiaoping’s “Four Cardinal Principles” of insisting on the socialist road, the people’s democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong-Thought. Some of these nouveaux riches even believe that these theories represent the first step in a shift in Communist Party ideology away from hostility and toward the concept of human nature (as opposed to class nature)—as if wrapping the hard Party line with a soft layer of popular culture were better, all things considered, than glinting, naked slogans in hard, cold steel.
The saddest thing about the general erosion of our younger generation is that this kind of cynicism has taken hold as their life philosophy.
Many people were expelled from the Communist Party in the purge that followed the Tiananmen Massacre. Many others withdrew voluntarily. So for a few years the number of people joining the Party declined steeply. But, after ten years of co-optation and forcible political amnesia, the number of young people seeking to enter the Party has been rising again. In order to advertise how attractive the Party is to the young, the regime in recent years has used the July 1 anniversary of the Party’s founding to present a barrage of propaganda on the great increase in Party-membership applications from young people. They particularly emphasize the increasing number of university students applying for membership. A report on China Central Television claims that as many as 60 percent of university students now apply. The statistic tallies with another recent media report that 65 percent of Chinese youth support the Communist Party. Between the lines, this report reflects the actual reasons why young people join and support the Party: there has been a radical shift from idealism to materialism. The report says nothing about the principles of the Communist Party, high-minded Communist ideals, or the Party’s fighting spirit. It skirts all that to emphasize the Party’s “glorious achievements”—from Mao Zedong’s declaration that the Chinese people have “stood up,” to Deng Xiaoping’s that they have “riched-up,” right until now, when Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” and Hu Jintao’s “New Three Principles of the People” have captured it all. All this propaganda is aimed at telling people that the Communist Party, from the beginning of “reform and opening,” has accomplished the spectacular political achievements of increasing the nation’s strength, raising the nation’s prestige, and enriching the nation’s people, and that that is why the Party holds such great attraction to the nation’s youth.
One can be skeptical of these government statistics, yet anyone familiar with today’s urban young people will probably not have much doubt about them. The post-Tiananmen generation, raised with prospects of moderately good living conditions inside a culture of pragmatism, is not very interested in things like deep thought, noble character, incorruptible and well-ordered government, humane values, or transcendent moral concerns. Their approach to life is practical and opportunistic. Their main goals are to become an official, get rich, or go abroad. Their primary interests and pleasures are to follow trends in fashion, ape the “coolness” of celebrities, and maintain a high level of consumption. They are hooked on Internet gaming and one-night stands. All this happens because, even before the young set out on their own in life, their environment—in the family as well as in the society at large—has already imbued them with attitudes of entitlement and privilege, and a single-minded pursuit of self-interest.
Unrelenting inculcation of Chinese Communist Party ideology has created ruptures in history and produced generations of people whose memories are blank. The people of mainland China have suffered some unimaginable catastrophes after the Communist accession to power, but the post-Tiananmen generation has no deep impressions of them and lacks firsthand experience of police-state oppression. Their personal experience shows them only the truth of slogans like “Seek money” and “Power brings riches.” They see “the end justifies the means” in everything around them. “Success,” in their eyes, is to get rich overnight or be a celebrity in film or popular music. They have no patience at all for people who talk about suffering in history or any evils in today’s society. A vicious Anti-Rightist Campaign? A huge Great Leap famine? A devastating Cultural Revolution? A Tiananmen massacre? All of this criticizing of the government and exposing of the society’s “dark side” is, in their view, completely unnecessary. They prefer to use their own indulgent lifestyles plus the stories that officialdom feeds to them as proof that China has made tremendous progress.
China’s “one child” population policy has contributed to the problem. Most of today’s urban young have no siblings and grew up at the centers of their families, as “little emperors,” in the popular phrase. They have gotten used to seeing their desires placed at the center of everything and have had no worries about material life. They cannot comprehend the hardships that their parents’ generation endured or that the lower strata of society still endure today. They develop a “me first” worldview and lack feelings of concern for others. When they pass the entrance exams to make it into university, they become even more the darlings of their families and the pride of their communities. Their families pamper them into absolute egotism, then society channels them into invidious competition for wealth, status, and the pleasures of conspicuous consumption.
In similar fashion, the great majority of rural children who score high enough to get into college turn out not to be very concerned with helping farmers escape prejudice and poverty. They aim instead to succeed as urbanites, join the elite, and completely escape the fate of farming generation after generation. That they think this way is quite understandable, of course.
In recent years, nationalism in mainland China has become even more virulent in parts of the population than it is within the regime. Especially in its anti-American, anti-Ja
panese, and anti-Taiwan-independence versions, nationalism has become the greatest of social passions among some of the young. It is a way not only to express concern for China but to vent hatred upon other countries: the American “spy-plane incident,” Japanese “buying sex in Zhuhai,” a Japanese student at Northwest University “humiliating China,” Japanese prime minister Koizumi visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, the Chinese businesswoman Zhao Yan being beaten by American police, the China-Japan Asia Cup final … all these incidents, blown way out of proportion, have served to stimulate the collective indignation of “patriotic” Chinese youth. Nationalist invective on the Internet has grown increasingly violent, even thuggish. Murderous curses spring up everywhere, peppered by grandiloquent posturing about “sacrificing one’s life for the nation.”
On the other hand, no matter how “patriotic” these “angry youth” get, they do not let their patriotism interfere with their self-interest. Not only are they universally silent about government violence, they avoid mention of violence in society as well. Numbed social sympathies and atrophied senses of justice have already become epidemic social diseases in China: no one cares for an old man who falls down sick in the street; no one tries to rescue a peasant girl who slips and falls into a river; a hooligan beats and rapes a woman on a bus while none of the many strong young men on the bus lifts a finger to help her; another hooligan parades two young women down a street “as an example to the masses” while everyone stands around enjoying the spectacle and no one makes a move to help … Chilling reports like these appear regularly in the media, even on state television.
So these are the two sides of the “patriotism” of China’s “angry youth”: vehement, heroic talk against foreigners, and cowardly inaction against the ills of their own society.
The “patriotic” young woman who challenged President Clinton with a fairly unfriendly question when he visited Peking University in 1998 is today married to an American. This dramatic piece of news stirred up hot commentary among “patriotic youth” when it came out. Sadly, however, the gaping disconnect between the woman’s language and her actions did not lead these people into the least bit of psychological analysis or self-interrogation. They just cursed her, unreflectively, then just as naturally went off to study in America. When these students are cursing America, they are filled with righteous indignation; when sitting on a plane headed for Boston, their hearts are even more wild with joy.
A few days ago, I read an Internet post by someone who had signed on as “leonphoenix.” It read: “I like American commercial products and American blockbuster movies. I like American freedom. I envy American wealth and power, but usually I still shout, with everyone else, ‘Down with America!!!’ This is an unavoidable reaction; it is the instinctive feeling of an underdog.” Protecting himself with a pseudonym, leonphoenix exposed the truth about this cynical “patriotism.”
We can see here why “liberal” professors often complain that official brainwashing during the 1990s has had its greatest effect among university students.
The educated young have the same cynical attitude when they apply to join the Communist Party. The number of applicants who are university students has gone up, but the ones who genuinely believe in communism are as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns—just as rare as the students who say “no” to the barbarism of the state system or to the violence that occurs around them. I do not know whether the Peking University student who married the American was a Party member. If she was not, then her behavior represents the practical survival mentality of most Chinese youth. If she was, then what she said in school and what she chose after graduating form a perfect example of the cynical opportunism among Chinese youth today: here we have “the rationality of economic man” run amok. Maximization of personal profit becomes the core value. If we wanted to put it nicely, we could call this a reawakening of the autonomy of the individual. Put more bluntly, it is sheer pursuit of personal gain.
It is one thing to seek entry to the Communist Party without a belief in communism, and to denounce America while one is addicted to American fads; most bizarre, though, is that these young people seem splendidly unaware of these self-contradictions and free of the slightest moral concern about them. On the contrary, they feel quite satisfied with themselves: if they get what they want to get, then the choices they made were right.
Any Chinese student who wants to have an effect in the world wants to join the Party. This is not idealism, just the need for a tool. In China under the Communist Party, no matter what your job is after graduation, you will do better as a Party member. Moreover, surveys of the aspirations of university students in recent years have shown that the number one choice in occupations now is an official post in the Party-state. In their talk about joining the Party, students speak entirely without officialese. Their talk is purely pragmatic, and quite eloquent.
A third-year university student became flushed with anger as he debated these things with me. “In China,” he said, “you have to join the Party if you want to get anything done. It’s the only way to advance or get power, and without power you’re nowhere. What’s wrong with joining the Party? What’s wrong with being an official and getting rich? You and your family get a decent living, and you can also do more for society than others can.”
The Chinese Communist Party’s own mode of survival resembles that of these students. On the surface, the Party’s approach, with all of its ideological preaching, might seem quite different. But anyone familiar with the Chinese Communist Party’s history of seizing power, wielding power, and maintaining power will easily see the parallels. The key element is opportunism that puts self-interest above all and permits any means, however unscrupulous, in the pursuit of goals. Devious survival techniques captured in traditional clichés like “Hide one’s strengths and bide one’s time,” “Choose humiliation over defeat,” “Whoever feeds me milk is my mother,” and “You can’t be a great man if you’re not devious” have been watchwords for the interpersonal relations of Party leaders as well as for their relations, collectively, with the world. In the post-Mao era, Deng Xiaoping’s pronouncement that “black or white, a cat that catches mice is a good cat” is said to have brought a “decline of communist ideals.” In fact, however, Mao Zedong’s own survival strategies always had to do with power. When did Mao ever hold on to some ideal or maintain some moral bottom line? His high-sounding rhetoric about liberation of the whole world never kept him from persecuting or murdering people, even to the point of letting it be known he would have no regrets sacrificing one-third of humanity to see the globe turn red.
In short, all these groups—college students and young intellectuals who want to join the Party, officials who are “working within the system,” and my acquaintances who have gone into business to get rich—are positioned similarly. Almost none of them support the current political system in any genuine moral sense, and yet the practical roles that they play all help the system to maintain its stability.
That people can live at ease with their split personalities, and be untroubled by them, is a good illustration of the split consciousness that permeates the whole of society. Street gossip, sarcastic political ditties, and dirty jokes have all burgeoned in China since the 1989 massacre, and all these things function in two different ways: on the one hand they express dissatisfaction and attack the regime, on the other hand they help people to accept current realities by blowing off steam and relaxing their nerves.
China has entered an “Age of Sarcasm.” Anywhere outside of state-sponsored parties, entertainment shows, or the comedies and skits on television, China’s rulers and official corruption have become the main material for the sarcastic humor that courses through society. Virtually anyone can tell a political joke laced with pornographic innuendo, and almost every town and village has its own rich stock of satirical political ditties. Private dinner gatherings become informal stage shows for venting grievances and telling political jokes; the better jokes and ditties,
told and retold, spread far and wide.
This material is the authentic public discourse of mainland China, and it forms a sharp contrast with what appears in the state-controlled media. To listen only to the public media, you could think you are living in paradise; if you listen only to the private exchanges, you will conclude that you are living in hell. One shows only sweetness and light, the other only a sunless darkness.
For people in the lower strata of society, the bitter complaint about hardship and injustice represents their true inner feelings. But for those who benefit from the system—the power-holders, their associated elites, and the urban middle class—the sarcasm of jokes and ditties has become just a way of amusing themselves over cards or meals. The complaint has long since lost the sharpness of daggers or spear points, and hasn’t any genuine moral force, either. The mocking ends when a gathering ends, and it has absolutely no influence on the other stage shows that these people perform in the public arena. The popular entertainment can even have a druglike narcotic effect. Amid the revelry of eating, drinking, slapping their poker cards onto a table, or shuffling mahjong tiles—“consuming” everything in sight—the revelers consume good jokes about hardship, corruption, and injustice. When the laughter ends, everything reverts to standard operating procedures for these people: when they need to lie, they lie; when they need to be ruthless, they are ruthless; when they need to grab personal gain, no scruple stops them.