No Enemies, No Hatred

by Liu Xiaobo

  What the Wanzhou and Weng’an incidents both show is how a random and relatively minor event can trigger expression of the systemic and increasingly serious antagonism between officials and the people that has grown from a long, accumulated record in China of official tyranny and deceit. It is hardly an exaggeration to speak of “sparks in a tinderbox.”

  The two incidents also make clear the crucial importance of the Internet, a new medium that official censorship has never been able fully to control. In recent times, whenever large-scale “sensitive incidents” take place, they almost always emerge first on the Internet. It is significant, moreover, that when netizens report these confrontations between the government and the people, they tend invariably to side with the people. Standard government accounts have practically zero credibility on the Web. In other words: if large-scale “incidents” between officials and the people can reveal how deep the antagonism is between these two sides, what netizens’ reactions to these incidents show is the almost total lack of public trust in official reporting on such matters. This happens because any netizen with an interest in politics or current affairs is already familiar, from his or her personal experience on the Web, with the ways in which the authoritarian regime lies and dissembles. So whenever a conflict breaks out between the government and citizens, Internet opinion reflexively heads for the citizens’ side and makes the question “What really happened?” the first order of business.

  In today’s China, the balance of strength between the government and the people in daily life is slowly but steadily drifting in the direction of more strength for the people and less for the government. The “Weng’an incident” is just another piece of evidence of this trend.

  It does remain true that there is no freedom of speech or judicial independence in China and that, therefore, people whose rights and interests are violated can expect no help from executive or judicial authority and no support from public opinion through official channels. The one object of hope that ordinary people still cling to is the “petition system” for appealing to higher authority—but that system, after years of abuse, now exists in name only, as a somewhat freakish appendage of the dictatorial apparatus itself.

  On the other hand, the good news is that the Chinese people today are no longer the ignorant and obedient “masses” of old; they increasingly are citizens who are aware of their rights and are ready to act on them. They have limited patience for officials inured to arbitrary power, and they are keenly aware of the forms that official deceit takes. This is why tyrannical authority has been steadily declining and why the deterrent power of government intimidation is far less than it once was. There is no way that popular political currents such as these, or the rights-defense movement that expresses them, are suddenly going to shift direction out of respect for the will of the regime or its associated elites. The question is not whether the government welcomes this trend, or whether such a trend is possible. The only real question is when, and by what means, the trend will shift from a scattered pattern—rising first here, then there, then somewhere else—and turn into a unified pattern like the one we saw during the nationwide protests of 1989.

  Whether China’s power elite wants to admit it or not, its record over the last two decades of nefarious behavior and violence against ordinary people has already led to a distrust of officialdom and an appetite for political participation that have prepared the ground for this kind of huge 1989-style mobilization. When the people’s demands for justice and fairness continue not to be satisfied, or even relieved, and when their appeals for rights and their desires for participation continue to be repressed, then, at that point, more repression leads only to more popular demands, and only makes a major outburst more likely. With society in this sort of condition, an outburst in a major city, no matter over what issue, could precipitate a conflagration.

  President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are at least somewhat aware of this situation. This is why, as soon as they came to power six years ago, they initiated a policy of “drawing close to the people.” But their policy addresses only the symptoms of the problem, not its causes. The Hu-Wen approach has been to grant a few favors from on high without making any changes in the way society works. No amount of shouting “We’re getting close to people!” will be able to solve problems like the ever-worsening corruption in China. The only ways in which China’s current regime can defuse popular hostility and avoid a comprehensive social crisis are these:

  —allow space for flexible political mobilization among the people;

  —provide an effective legal order through which popular “rights defense” and political participation can operate, without violence;

  —permit political solutions to the vicious cycle of social injustices that China’s unbalanced economic reforms have generated; and

  —protect the rights of the people and restrain official abuses of power while moving China gradually toward a system in which human rights are guaranteed.

  Beijing, June 30, 2008

  Originally published in Guancha (Observe China), June 30, 2008

  Translated by Josephine Chiu-Duke

  PART II

  CULTURE AND SOCIETY

  EPILOGUE TO CHINESE POLITICS AND CHINA’S MODERN INTELLECTUALS

  This piece, written in New York in 1989 just before Liu Xiaobo returned to China to join the protests at Tiananmen, marks a watershed in his thinking. It is an epilogue to his book Chinese Politics and China’s Modern Intellectuals (Taibei, 1990) in which he uses Western ideas as standards to criticize Chinese intellectual culture. After the book manuscript was finished, Liu suddenly had some profound doubts about Western culture itself, and with characteristic frankness lays these bare, sparing no one, including himself.—Ed.

  THIS BOOK MAY HAVE SOME VALUE in comparing China and the West, and maybe in the project of reforming China as well. China’s present condition, in international comparison, is just too outmoded, too degenerate, too fossilized, and too senile; it needs challenge, even “menace,” from another civilization; it needs a vast and surging, boundless sea to pound it out of its isolation, its solitude, and its narrow-mindedness; it even needs a taste of the humiliation of “falling behind” in order to spur its determination to transform itself. Western culture can serve as a comparison that helps to illuminate the contours, including the many flaws, of Chinese culture, as a critical tool with which to attack China’s obsolescence, and as a source of wisdom that can bring new lifeblood to China.

  But on the other hand, this book may have no value at all in matters such as the fate of humanity, the future of the globe, or fulfillment in the lives of individual human beings. The problems this book concerns itself with are too shallow and parochial for that; they are problems specifically of China and the Chinese, not of any larger or deeper questions. The book has value only as a kind of cultural detritus; its two greatest shortcomings are the narrow nationalism of its outlook and its blind obsequiousness toward Western culture.

  Like everything else I have written about Chinese culture, this book is grounded in Chinese nationalism. It is far from the “wholesale Westernization” for which I have been criticized. One of the main characteristics of Western culture, in my view, is its tradition of critical reason, and to be “Westernized” in a true sense requires one to adopt a critical attitude toward everything—the West as well as China. It also requires concern for the fate of all humanity and for the incompleteness of the individual person. By contrast, the impulse to use Western culture merely as a tool with which to regenerate the Chinese nation is classic Sino-centrism and not real “Westernization.” My preoccupation with China has limited my ability to reflect on matters at a higher level. (I believe most Chinese intellectuals have been similarly blinkered. These nationalist blinders explain, I think, why China has produced no world-class intellect in recent times.) I am unable to enter conversation with advanced, global culture over the fate of humanity as a whole, and I am helpless to pursue individual transc
endence of the kind that religions offer. I am too practical, too materialist, and remain too bogged down in the backwardness of China’s realities and secular concerns.

  My fate—that of having no transcendent values, and no God—is perhaps not so different from that of the great Lu Xun (1881–1936). In his vignettes called Wild Grass, Lu Xun plumbs the depths of the human condition; what he needed at this stage of his life were transcendent values with which to address his inner schisms. But he could not find any. In the despair of seeing a road that ends only in a graveyard, he needed a hand from God; no secular value would do. He had launched his career from his ability to stand apart from Chinese culture, from where he could deliver withering criticisms of it. From there he moved on to discover disappointment with himself, and then the existential concerns of Wild Grass. But ultimately Wild Grass, because it lacks a sense of absolute value that can transcend worldly concerns, stands both as the pinnacle of Lu Xun’s creativity and as the self-dug grave from which there was no escape for him.

  After Wild Grass Lu Xun could no longer bear his inner world of isolation, solitude, and despair. He could not tolerate lonely confrontation with the unknown, or the terror of the grave, and could not undertake a transcendent dialogue with his own soul under the attentive gaze of God. Eventually he left those struggles behind and plunged back into philistine China, where he engaged in word wars with some mediocre intellects who were in no way his match. His battles with mediocrity led him, too, into mediocrity. The practical mentality of a traditional herb doctor won out in his mind, and a godless Lu Xun had nowhere to go but down. Nietzsche had influenced Lu Xun deeply, but there was one great difference between the two: Nietzsche, despairing over humanity and himself, could ride on his “superman” notion to a higher level; Lu Xun, similarly despairing over China and himself, could find no such alternative, and fell back into the sordid reality that he had once rejected.

  This problem leads me to another question. Why is it that exiled writers, philosophers, and scientists from European countries—not just Western Europe but the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, too—have been so outstanding while those from China have been so unremarkable? Why are Chinese writers and thinkers who go abroad and live in exile so unproductive? I think it is because their vision is parochial. They care only about China, and are too practical, too materialistic. They have no transcendent impulse, lack the courage to face an unfamiliar or uncertain world, and lack a spirit of the individual standing alone to challenge a larger world. They felt comfortable only on their home turf, where they could hear the plaudits of fatuous multitudes. It was very difficult for them to leave behind their renown in China and start from scratch in a strange land. Back in China, their every action and utterance had drawn attention throughout society, but now, overseas, they do not get this worshipful regard; apart from the enthusiasm of a few Westerners who care about China, no one pays them any heed. Their China-centered mentality, so hard to shake off, can cause them to clutch for dear life to the straw man of patriotism. What they really need, if they are to deal with their isolation, is not support from others but inner strength. No matter how famous they were in China, and no matter how high a status they had, once they are overseas in an unfamiliar environment they have no real choice but to rely on themselves. It is a test of talent, wisdom, and creativity.

  This is why I feel that, even while I praise Western culture, and however I use it to criticize Chinese culture in this book, I remain a “frog at the bottom of a well” that actually sees little more than a patch of blue sky the size of the palm of my hand. None of my critical reflections on China’s condition or traditions require much intelligence or creativity. All the theoretical tools that I use have been known and widely available for a long time. I by no means “discovered” them. Centuries ago Western literati expressed, with crystal clarity, a number of ideas that Chinese today regard as profound novel truths. These truths are common knowledge in the West, and in terms of “innovation” are actually obsolete. If this is coal, no one needs Liu Xiaobo to carry it to Newcastle.

  My own best hope is only to get as deep and accurate a grasp of these things as I can. On a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I suddenly realized how insignificant the China issues that I have been wrestling with are, if one measures them in terms of true spiritual creativity. Looking at the masterworks, I was struck with how superficial my thinking was, and how atrophied my vitality, after so many years of being cooped up in a benighted environment of what was, essentially, a cultural desert. Eyes kept too long in the darkness do not easily adapt to dazzling sunlight when it suddenly pours through a window. How could I, all of a sudden, face my own situation squarely, much less engage in dialogue with world-class thinkers?

  All I can do now is hope to abandon the hollow fame of my past, make a clean start of things, and set out into an as-yet unknown world. Success or failure will depend not just on whether I make use of the large stashes of knowledge that humanity has already accumulated; it will depend, too, on exploration of the unknown, as well as on my intelligence and whether I can muster the courage to be an authentic person. I hope I will be able to endure the pain—not pain suffered for the sake of others, but the pain of extricating myself from a terrible bind. If I fail, at least let the failure be genuine. If it is, at least it will be worth more than all the empty victories I have had.

  My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws in Western culture—or, even if I see them, to set them aside intentionally. I have not, therefore, been able to stand apart from Western culture, take a critical view of it, and perhaps get a better view of human frailty more generally. I have been obsequious toward Western civilization, exaggerating its merits, and at the same time exaggerating my own merits. I have viewed the West as if it were not only the salvation of China but also the natural and ultimate destination of all humanity. Moreover I have used this delusional idealism to assign myself the role of savior. In the past I have always despised “saviors”—at least when they were other people. But wittingly or unwittingly, I myself could not help slipping into this role, with all its attendant complacency and grandiosity.

  I now realize that Western civilization, while it can be useful in reforming China in its present stage, cannot save humanity in an overall sense. If we stand back from Western civilization for a moment, we can see that it possesses all the flaws of humanity in general. I am reminded of what Zhuangzi (369–286 BCE) said in “The Floods of Autumn”:

  However great the river, it is nothing compared to the ocean; however vast the ocean, it still is not the cosmos.

  The belief that one can possess all of the beauty that exists is nothing but a dream. And so it is with human civilizations: China is backward compared with the West; but the West is only part of humanity, and humanity itself is tiny within the universe. The mind-boggling arrogance of human beings shows itself both in the complacency of Chinese-style moral pride as well as in Western-style confidence in the omnipotence of reason and science. No matter how strongly modern Western intellectuals may critique Western rationalism, and no matter how harshly they may denounce the West’s colonial expansion and the premise of white superiority, they still maintain deep-rooted feelings of superiority toward non-Western peoples. They feel proud of the courage and sincerity with which they do self-criticisms. They easily offer criticisms that they make of themselves, but have trouble listening to criticisms that originate from outside the West.

  If I, as a person who has lived under China’s autocratic system for more than thirty years, want to reflect on the fate of humanity or on how to be an authentic person, I have no choice but to carry out two critiques simultaneously. I must:

  1. Use Western civilization as a tool to critique China.

  2. Use my own creativity to critique the West.

  Neither of these kinds of critique can substitute for the other. Nor
can the two be jumbled together. I might point out that the West’s overriding emphasis on rationality, science, and money has resulted in the loss of individuality and in a commercialization that overwhelms all resistance; I might also criticize the economic stratification that technological integration has brought about, and I can repudiate the ways in which consumer culture has inured humanity to an unquestioning addiction to affluence and a cowardly fear of freedom. But none of these criticisms can be reasonably applied to an impoverished China, where there is still little awareness of science. We must guard against using the criteria by which we criticize the West to apply to China; that makes about as much sense as playing zither music to an ox or shooting at phantoms. Still less should we use the criteria that we apply to China as the standard that we expect of the West; to do that would be to launch all of humanity on a race to the bottom. Some Western intellectuals, beginning from criticisms of their own societies, have looked Eastward, peering toward mystical Eastern culture in search of solutions to humanity’s problems; but this is often fatuous self-delusion of a most ridiculous sort. “Eastern culture” in today’s world cannot even come to grips with the problems in its own region, let alone be any beacon for humanity as a whole.