No Enemies, No Hatred
Page 8
After years of spanning such huge discrepancies, no feelings of awkwardness get in the way. And so it is that the Communist regime, while incessantly reviled in private, still sails along, fully “stable”; and so it is that high officials, the butts of derision all across the country in private, continue to parade in grandeur, on and on.
The country lives with two black curtains. Government prohibitions, published and unpublished, produce an official black curtain behind which members of the power elite jockey with one another to divide up assets that properly belong to all of the Chinese people. Meanwhile citizens have built their own, unofficial black curtain, behind which they vent grievances they are not allowed to express in public, and seek some diversion as well. But everyone, on both sides of both black curtains, is obliged to live within a single set of rules—the unwritten rules of the Party-state.
We are left with the paradoxical but undeniable conclusion that the spiritual landscape of post-totalitarian China is split and unified at the same time. The splits between “inside the system” and “outside the system,” between official and popular language, between public postures and private commentary, between dreadful realities and comic performances—all these should be mind-boggling. Yet, miraculously, our “cynical survival mode” unifies all of them: bitter reality becomes popular comic skits; venting complaint turns into self-anesthetization; ridiculing the power elite degenerates into mere popular amusement. Other than pleasure-seeking and consumerism, it seems that the only fruit of our social development is a cancerous overgrowth of “the rational economic man”: maximize personal gain, and that’s all.
At home in Beijing, September 15, 2004
Originally published in Kaifang (Open Magazine), October 2004
Translated by Michael S. Duke
WHAT ONE CAN BEAR
For my suffering wife
You said to me
“I can bear anything”
with stubborn eyes you faced the sun
until blindness became a ball of flame
and the flame turned the sea to salt
Beloved
let me ask you through the dark
before you go to your grave, remember
to write me a letter with your ashes, remember
to leave me your address in the netherworld
Your bone-shards will lacerate the page
so you cannot complete a single word
the shattered brushstrokes will pierce your heart
and the scorching heat of your insomnia
will surprise you
A stone that has borne the weight of the world
is hard enough to break my skull
the white lozenges formed from my brains
will poison our love
and our poisoned love
will poison our selves
In the labor camp, December 28, 1996, my birthday
Translated by Isaac P. Hsieh
A KNIFE SLID INTO THE WORLD
For my Xia
You’re a knife
a little one that could never
injure anyone at all
slid into the world
leaving no bloodstain, not cutting
just dizzying
just the true form exposed
just a beam of cold light lingering on the rot
you insert yourself into the noisy city or a party
but what’s inside you is far away
the knifetip’s shine doesn’t dazzle
but still you bring about
the feeling of watching ants from a seat in the clouds
a hat lost in a deep ravine
A knife
your only gift
is nourishing wounds in dark places
stretching out your limbs between the pages of books
slim and bright
A knife
but you’ve never had a sheath
you’re confident that your existence
is a danger
even though you smile every day
you have the power to mortify
Like an observer placed outside the world
detached and leisurely
astonishingly sharp
astonishingly perfect
all on the spine side of the blade
In the labor camp, March 31, 1997
Translated by Nick Admussen
BELLICOSE AND THUGGISH
The Roots of Chinese “Patriotism” at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century
DURING THE LAST CENTURY of China’s history the nation has fallen victim to cycles of self-abasement and self-aggrandizement, and this is because we have never been able to escape the clutches of the demon of nationalism.
Some say that a century and a half ago the Opium War plunged China into “the greatest transformation in a thousand years.” If so, then today, after traversing a tortuous, painful, and traumatic path, and after missing plenty of opportunities to transform ourselves, we now perhaps should say that China has reached “the most favorable situation in a thousand years.” It is most favorable because never before has it been so clear where we ought be headed.
Over the hundred years before the Communists seized power in 1949, China’s internal and external environments never presented us with a clear direction. At the beginning of those hundred years, we suffered repeated humiliations by the gunboat diplomacy of the Great Powers. Such events, painful as they were, did let us see that the West was advanced in technical matters, and this led our forebears to pursue “foreign learning” in the hope that “technology will save the nation.” But then China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) showed that the ships of our new Beiyang navy, even though they had advanced armor and weapons, were badly organized and by themselves could not “save the nation.” This led us to look for defects in China’s political system and to turn toward “establishing a constitution to save the nation.” Finally, the chaos after the Republican Revolution of 1911 and Yuan Shikai’s attempt to reinstate the Confucian imperial system, with himself as emperor, caused people to look beyond both “technology” and the “political system” to deeper issues in Chinese culture as the root cause of China’s problems. Soon the “cannibalistic” teachings of Confucius, embodied in the ruling imperial system, came to be seen as the roots of China’s ruin. The “new culture movement” of the late 1910s and early 1920s called for “Science and Democracy” and “Down with Confucius and Sons.” Now it was culture that would “save the nation.”
From “our technology is not as good as other people’s” to “our political system is not as good as other people’s” and on to “our culture is not as good as other people’s,” Chinese reflections on our own defects probed ever deeper. But the primary mindset that guided the probing was neither “liberation of humanity” or even “enriching the people,” but rather a sense of shame at China’s loss of sovereignty and other national humiliations. All the reform efforts sprang from this kind of relatively narrow nationalism; the goals of enriching the state and of strengthening the military took precedence over ideas that could lead to human freedom. This was the main thrust of the great May Fourth Movement as most intellectuals experienced it. The great majority did not see the movement as going much beyond slogans like “Boycott Japanese goods,” “Refuse to sign the Treaty of Versailles,” and “Down with traitors who sell out the nation.” (See Deng Chaolin, Memoirs, Dongfang Publishers, 2004, internally restricted edition, pp. 161–168). It was right when this desperate quest to learn from the West in order to build military strength and save the nation had suffered one setback after another that Soviet Russia came on the scene. Its October Revolution placed before China a radically different model of modernization.
In China’s communist era, despite all of the rhetoric about internationalism and “liberation of mankind” during the Mao years, the regime, especially in its claims to legitimacy, has consistently stressed nationalism. Nationalism has taken different forms at different stag
es—an arrogant, bellicose style under Mao; a pragmatic, defensive style under Deng Xiaoping; and a resurgence of the arrogant, bellicose style under Jiang Zemin—but the underlying passions that shape the policies have always been caught up in a vicious cycle between self-abasement and self-aggrandizement.
I. The Bellicose Nationalism of the Mao Zedong Era
The truculent and bloodthirsty forms of ultra-nationalist sentiment that some mainlanders displayed after 9/11 sprang from roots that lay deep within the shrill warmongering of Mao Zedong. I recently read an Internet post that could well have been a People’s Daily editorial in the 1950s: “Bury the Wolf-hearted American Imperialist Ambition for World Hegemony.” The author calls the United States “politically, militarily and economically the most completely thuggish rogue nation in the world.” It dubs the U.S., Great Britain, and Japan “the true axis of evil” and calls on “the people of the entire world to unite, cast off their illusions and resolutely struggle to bury the wolf-hearted American imperialist ambition for world hegemony and to prevent it from visiting an enormous catastrophe upon the entire world.” Toward this end, the author concluded, China’s priority should be to unite with the Islamic world and Russia to launch an attack on American hegemony.
Turning to the American-led war on terror, the author produced an incomparably absurd—yet frightening—conclusion: “If Islam loses, China and Russia will be in danger. If China loses, Russia will lose for sure—and vice versa.” This is why, in his view, China and Russia should join in supporting Islamist hatred of the U.S. and spare no means to attack America, and why the most effective tools for doing so are “without doubt” terrorist attacks in the style of Osama Bin Laden. China’s primary allies from a strategic point of view are not the traditional communist-bloc nations (North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam), but the Islamic enemies of the United States (Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinians). Islamic fundamentalists and their doctrine of terrorism are not the enemies of world civilization; they are the main allies whom China must unite with in order to defeat the U.S.; they are China’s best national security shield. Jiang Zemin’s state visit to Iran and Syria after 9/11 was therefore a correct foreign policy move.
Most of the posted comments following this article matched it in truculence: “We must turn the Taiwan Strait into a fiery and bloody grave of the Taiwan independence forces”; “Burn the American aircraft carriers to ashes”; and so on. These comments are typical of today’s “bellicose nationalism.”
The nostalgia for Mao Zedong that we see in China today is in part a longing of the poor and downtrodden—the losers in the economic boom—for the egalitarianism and job security of the Mao era. But it is more than that. For the “patriots” in today’s rabid nationalism, it is nostalgia for a time when China dared to say “no” to both of the world’s superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union. I almost think we are back in the murderous Mao era when I hear so many “quotations from Chairman Mao”—things like “paper tiger,” “the East Wind prevails over the West Wind,” and so on. In particular, today’s bellicose patriotism draws upon the Mao-era mentality of “China at the center of the world.”
The origins of that idea, of course, preceded Mao. China’s emperors of old had no concept of sovereignty over a “nation” or a “state.” They thought in terms of All Under Heaven and embraced the very self-regarding notion that they were at the center and rightly should look down on everybody else. In the long history of imperial China until the latter half of the nineteenth century, no challenges from outside came along to force much of a change in this outlook. China was sui generis. Even foreign invaders like the Mongols in the Yuan period (1271–1368) and the Manchus in the Qing (1644–1911) ended up being Sinicized. We Chinese had little reason to look beyond our borders.
Even when we did peer outside, we never had the idea of a “nation-state” with clearly marked borders, but only the idea of All Under Heaven, with ourselves at the center. Imperial rulers took themselves to be masters of this borderless expanse. They governed using “ritual and propriety,” and unsubmissive peoples at the fringes of civilization were “barbarians.” The rulers saw themselves as occupying a central court to which distant peoples, their “tributary subjects,” came to pay homage. The role of the central authority was to “grant favor.” The various small “barbarian” groups stood to the great civilized Han as inferior to superior, as vassal to lord, as margin to center. There was no idea of equal relations between states.
Even when the Western powers used modern weaponry to force China’s doors open, the Sinocentric worldview of our forefathers did not change much. The nobility and the gentry class in late Qing times rarely spoke of Westerners without using pejorative terms; they seem truly to have believed that these “ocean people” from across the seas were “half human and half beast,” a “hybrid of human and fish,” or “bastards of bug and man.” Protecting the vanity of the Great Celestial Empire, conservative officials and benighted gentry concocted stories and spread rumors to inflame the xenophobic passions of commoners. Christian missionaries, for example, were said to eat babies, cut out people’s hearts and gouge out their eyes, drug and poison people, cause hallucinations, desecrate ancestors’ graves, seduce and rape women, abduct children, stockpile weapons, and teach banditry. The major cases of grievance that Western missionaries brought against China because of this nonsense had a lot to do with why the West forced the humiliating “unequal treaties” upon China.
China’s defeat in the 1894–95 war with Japan, a country once thought to be “as small as a pebble,” finally forced Chinese to start reining in the arrogant notion that the Son of Heaven rules all. But the Qing imperial court still manipulated the violence of the Boxers—the “Righteous and Harmonious Fists”—to vent its hatred of foreign countries and to protect its vain claim of China’s centrality. The term “foreign devils” survives in use in China even today.
A century of humiliating defeats and of falling behind did little to erase China’s underlying arrogance and self-centeredness. All it did, really, was to flip the self-obsession to the other extreme, the extreme of self-abasement. Then, when China did begin to grow strong again, the self-centeredness flipped back toward narcissism and arrogance, only now it had more steam.
Before they gained power, the Chinese Communists always stressed that the first goal of the Chinese Revolution was “anti-imperialism” and the second was “anti-feudalism.” After gaining power they continued in this vein, calling for the elimination of “the three big mountains that weigh on the people’s necks”—the first of which was “imperialism.” On August 18, 1949, Mao Zedong published a report, called “Farewell, Leighton Stuart,” on the departure from China of the U.S. ambassador, Leighton Stuart. The report became famous as an anti-American proclamation and as China’s farewell to semicolonial rule. A few weeks later, when Mao declared in another famous speech that “the Chinese people have stood up,” Chinese nationalism took a turn from cowardice and self-abasement back toward ill-informed arrogance.
Mao pursued a two-pronged foreign policy whose prongs were contradictory but worked well in tandem. On the one hand, to guard against military reinvasion by imperialists and “peaceful evolution” under capitalist influences, Mao closed China’s doors and sealed the country off, keeping the Chinese people ignorant of the outside. On the other hand, he touted “internationalism” and the “liberation of all mankind” in an attempt to play the role of leader of the whole world and to return China to its position at the center. The result, for the rest of the Mao era, was that China’s traditional mentality about its place in the world came roaring back and bellicose patriotism ran rampant.
The bellicose patriotism of the Mao era had four main historical conditions:
First, the victory in 1949 of the Soviet-backed Chinese Communists in their Civil War with the American-backed Chinese Nationalists (Guomindang) led China into a one-sided foreign policy and cut it off from much of the world.
Second, in th
e Cold War confrontation between the two major systems existing in the world, China stood with the Soviet Union and against the United States. It fought the U.S. to a stalemate in Korea (which the Chinese people were told was a “great victory” over U.S. imperialism), and when the French were defeated in Vietnam the reports of victory over Western imperialism were again flamboyantly exaggerated. The hype contributed to mindless self-confidence and a militarization of the economy, and fed into the disastrous Great Leap Forward.
Third, communism that liberates all humanity and internationalism that supports the Third World became ideological cover for an ambition that China return to the center of the world.
Fourth, a warmongering attitude prepared the nation to be ready at all times for the outbreak of World War Three.
Mao Zedong’s unbridled ambition and unrealistic imagination took full advantage of these four conditions. Mao had a superstitious belief in the power of the subjective will as well as in the barrel of the gun, and, once he was in power, was obsessed by the illusion that he could become the leader of world revolution. The economic program of the Mao era has sometimes been described as a planned economy, and sometimes as an attempt to overtake the major Western economies, but in fact it is probably most accurately viewed as dedicated to preparing for war. From the Korean War in the early 1950s onward, Mao was making the preparations. His 1950s and 1960s policies of stressing heavy industry, taking steel as “the key link,” encouraging population growth, moving war-related industries to a “third front” in the hinterland, and pursuing nuclear weaponry were all economic policies that were aimed at military goals.