No Enemies, No Hatred

by Liu Xiaobo

  The image of a sick old man controlling a whole country is a specialty of dictatorships. Mao Zedong, in the weeks before he died, could not speak clearly, but just the shape of his lips was enough to wield power. One sentence gleaned from him outweighed ten thousand from anyone else, and he still held sway over hundreds of millions of people. In his very last years, Ba Jin was even more ill than Mao. It is said that on several occasions, when his mind was at least semi-clear, he requested euthanasia but was refused. The Party would not agree, his family would not agree, and “people who loved the great literary master” would not agree. Ba Jin had to accede to their wishes, had to respect a principle greater and more noble than that of his own suffering, and so agreed to “live for all of you.”

  It was in this condition that he remained chair of the All-China Writers’ Association, the pinnacle of the literary corps that served the power elite. He was regularly listed as making “honorary” appearances at major events of political theater. Every year on his birthday, this “dean of the literary world,” with the careful assistance of family members and hospital staff, accepted formulaic, reverential visits from representatives of the dictatorship and a coterie of literary pretenders. Birthday congratulations also poured in from across the land, especially from students in elementary and high schools. In 2003, when the whole country marked his one hundredth birthday, and the honorific title of “people’s writer” was officially bestowed upon him, Premier Wen Jiabao paid him a bedside visit in person.

  There is a long tradition in China of power-holders using cultural figures to buy popular favor to enhance their power. It began more than two thousand years ago, in pre-Qin times, when kings patronized groups of artists. The Communists, though, are number one in the creative application of the technique. They have shown how to use it to maximum benefit, how to execute it with maximum ruthlessness (only Stalin’s exploitation of Gorky is comparable), and how to position their own political benefit as the sole criterion for its use. When the regime needs decoration, a famous literary figure is like a priceless antique vase, to be held on high for all to view; when the decorative need has passed, the vase can become a pile of broken shards, fit only to be to cast upon a barren plain. That is why Ba Jin’s relatives need to be so super-careful in tending to him. His intrinsic literary value died long ago, but the Communists still see in him a decorative value that they can exploit. This value is, however, a fragile commodity; a careless inadvertency might shatter it.

  In 2002, at the annual spring conventions of the Communist elite, official delegates inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing selected Ba Jin to be vice chair of the Tenth People’s Political Consultative Conference. This was while Ba Jin himself was lying in a semi-vegetative state in a Shanghai hospital. Working overtime to keep Ba Jin’s heart beating even as it appointed him to be a national leader, the regime had unwittingly provided an apt metaphor for the moral vacuity of its own rule. “Dead at heart,” it continues to exact a price that all of China must pay.

  On October 17, 2005, the day after Ba Jin’s death, the Jinling Evening News in Nanjing carried this message: “We received the bad news of Ba Jin’s passing shortly after 7:00 p.m. yesterday. Our reporter rushed to the East China Hospital, where tight security was in place. As more reporters arrived, so did armed police, who blocked the hospital’s two gates. Only city government vehicles were allowed to enter or leave, as municipal leaders one after another went to pay their last respects to the venerable writer. As reporters gathered outside the gates in ever larger numbers, the police presence grew in kind.”

  So there you have it: tight security, government officials allowed to enter, everybody else blocked out—the very picture of the regime-kept Ba Jin at the end. Far from “the conscience of the century,” he ended as a mirror of the intellectual in the totalitarian state: mediocre in literary work and timid in character, yet owner of a bizarrely outsized reputation. In these regards he is a fitting representative of others among the regime’s kept intellectuals. To make things worse, the lavish words that officials and fellow litterateurs have heaped upon his recently departed spirit only highlight the humiliating incongruity between the reality of Ba Jin and the myth. What words like “master,” “conscience,” and “banner” in fact show is not that the intellectual world respects the old man but only that it sees advantage in playing the hypocritical language game that has become part of its culture. In truth, this game hurts a person. The regime’s airtight security, its exaggerated solicitude, and its whispers of “heartfelt” concern only underscore the utter servility of the person who lives in the keep of the powerful. And extravagant praise, flamboyant exaggeration, and cynical hypocrisy from the pens of literati only magnify the humiliation.

  Understanding these things, one can see clearly that insistence on Ba Jin as a “high-flying banner” is, in fact, tantamount to insistence that the Chinese intellectual world continue to hold a white flag of surrender to the political autocracy. It is tragic that Chinese intellectuals, despite all the disasters they have survived and all lessons they have learned, can look at a white flag, as it hangs limply, and somehow see a “high-flying banner” dancing in the sky.

  At home in Beijing, October 25, 2005

  Originally published in Minzhu Zhongguo (Democratic China), October 27, 2005

  Translated by Perry Link

  ALONE IN WINTER

  To Xia

  The solitude of a winter night

  is the blue of a blank computer screen

  simply, obviously visible, and also nothing

  so just think of me as cigarette

  now to light, now to rub out

  go ahead, smoke!

  you’ll never finish

  A pair of bare feet crush into the snow

  like an ice cube falling into a glass

  drunkenness and madness

  are the drooping wings of a crow

  beneath the borderless shroud of earth

  black flames sob in silence

  The pen in my hand suddenly snaps

  a sharp wind skewers the sky

  stars disintegrate, then meet by chance in dreams

  curses, dripping with blood, write lines of verse

  the tenderness of skin remains

  a gleaming light again shines on you

  Solitude, plain to see

  towering above the tears of the cold night

  touches the marrow of the snow

  and I

  not smoke, not wine, not pen

  am nothing but an old book

  much like

  poison-toothed Wuthering Heights

  January 1, 1995

  Translated by Perry Link

  VAN GOGH AND YOU

  For Xiao Xia

  Your penmanship puts me to shame

  in your letters (each stroke a paragon)

  who’d catch the hint of despair?

  at the calluses where you grasp the pen

  Van Gogh’s sunflowers bloom

  How precious that empty chair!

  not for reading and writing, but for remembering

  each shift of the shoulders calls up another time

  you endure the raids with equanimity

  and savor Van Gogh’s images alone

  With your heart in your mouth

  each step may be your last

  sensing obstacles ahead, you pick your way

  across the opposite of love

  and on the other side of death

  where Van Gogh’s Sower comes to grief

  amid his sprouting seeds

  For you, a single room is Heaven

  returning home, deliverance

  now, when everyone’s become a singer

  and there’s none to mourn the dead

  you alone keep still

  beside that empty chair

  Bloody deeds remembered grip the throat

  words are salty, voices dim

  neither round-the-clock surveillance

&nbs
p; nor the watcher in your mind

  can snatch away your pen

  and the blizzard in the painting

  Van Gogh’s severed ear takes flight

  seeking the right tint for you

  the clumsy stride

  of muddy peasant shoes

  shall bear you to Jerusalem’s wailing wall

  August 14, 1997

  Translated by A. E. Clark

  THE EROTIC CARNIVAL IN RECENT CHINESE HISTORY

  IN THE YEARS SINCE THE TIANANMEN MASSACRE, the rampant materialism of the power elite’s moves to privatize wealth has given rise in China to a consumer culture that has grown ever more hedonistic, superficial, and vulgar, and the social function of this materialism has been to bolster the dictatorial political order. Sarcasm in the entertainment world has turned into a kind of spiritual massage that numbs people’s consciences and paralyzes their memories; incessant propaganda about “the state drawing close to the people” reinforces the notion that the government is the savior of the people—who accordingly are its servants. Meanwhile an erotic carnival of products in commercial culture invite entry, real or fantasized, into a world of mistresses, prostitutes, adultery, one-night stands, and other forms of sexual abandon.

  The craze for political revolution in decades past has now turned into a craze for money and sex. Mao Zedong, that most exalted icon of the revolutionary era, has gradually lost his halo to some very non-Maoist values, and even his own legacy has become a commodity. At the same time, the shameful truth about the tyrant’s private life has become ever more clear. Stories about the peccadilloes of Mao and other high-level Party leaders of the past not only feed popular jokes today, but also serve officials of all ranks by offering them examples of how adultery is done. Thus the ghost of Mao not only helps the political “left” by supplying it with ideological language for stimulating narrow nationalism but also is of service to today’s business elite, who get pointers on how to enjoy wealth and power.

  The glorious dream of overnight riches has come to include a thirst for sex that happens night after night. When lust, long-suppressed during the Mao years, is suddenly released, it looks everywhere for action: “keeping mistresses”; “whoring”; what have you. The joys of adultery and the screams from the bed are then packaged as cultural products. Countless soap operas and blockbuster movies feed on the “flesh explosion” that is happening everywhere. Literature has entered the era of “writing the body.” First came the “pretty-girl writers,” who sold accounts of their personal sexual adventures, and then came the “pretty-boy writers,” who did about the same. Next we saw the erotics of the white-collar bar, followed by the confessions of prostitutes, followed by straightforward records of fact known as “diaries from the waist down.” Next a woman, who claimed to hold the M.A. degree, posted nude photographs of herself on the Internet. “Sex literature” has boomed on the Internet and has deteriorated into bald expression of sexual appetite and fleshly encounter. No wisp of shame is visible.

  A Steady Rise in Exposure of Flesh

  1. Eros That Broke through Government Restrictions in the 1980s

  In the midst of China’s passions for “liberation of thought” in the 1980s, commercial culture, largely from Hong Kong and Taiwan, seeped into the mainland and challenged the dictatorial status quo on two levels. First, it helped to undo Party culture. It helped people to get out of the “class struggle” mentality and turn toward more natural human feelings. Second, it helped to dismantle cultural elitism. It broke the hegemony of cultural elites and led to variety in the cultural marketplace and variety in the tastes of audiences. When popular culture like songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan, the martial arts fiction of Hong Kong writer Jin Yong, and the love stories of Taiwan writer Qiong Yao spread through the mainland, not only did people stop reading things that preached the Party line; they also turned quickly away from elite magazines like People’s Literature, Poetry, and Harvest and the “serious” literature they contained. In short, popular culture performed a wonderful service in causing the Party-directed “great unity in culture” to collapse. It brought major divisions into the cultural market, where three main kinds of literature—official, elite, and commercial (or popular)—now existed in parallel. People were no longer limited to the forcible messages of official culture or the sermons of the intellectual elite; now they had other cultural products to choose from.

  These new cultural products naturally involved the topics of love and sexual desire. Erotic liberation in the 1980s began with Hong Kong and Taiwan popular music, hand-copied novels, and Japanese films, with Japanese films and love songs of Taiwan crooner Teresa Teng leading the way. For an older generation of mainland listeners, who were accustomed to the “iron melodies” of state socialism, Teresa Teng’s soft, velvet-throated sobs about the joys and pains of romantic love seemed to be nothing but decadence that eats away at revolutionary resolve. But her voice intoxicated the younger generation, the one that grew up after the Cultural Revolution. Even under the pressure of the “Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign” of 1983, Teresa Teng’s songs remained popular all across China. They not only charmed listeners but inspired imitators, thereby planting seeds for later popular music on the mainland. In a similar way, the elegant long hair of the heroine of the Japanese movie Pursuit, and the undying devotion of the lovers in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing dominated the nighttime erotic fantasies of urban youth.

  By the middle 1980s, there were three main ways that Chinese people satisfied their erotic hunger. One was to consume foreign literature in translation, like the erotic novels of D. H. Lawrence. A second was to watch pornographic videotapes in secret; to gather at the home of a friend who had a VCR and watch “skin flicks” had become one of the more intimate modes of friendship. A third, for those who had the good luck to travel abroad, was to make tourist stops at the “red light districts” of the capitalist world. People returning to China from such trips were always happy to tell their buddies everything.

  In literature, the erotic liberation that “reform and opening” allowed to China’s writers did not extend to description of lust or the human body. Political strictures required that such topics still be packaged as “love.” Zhang Jie’s 1979 short story “Love Must Not Be Forgotten,” famous for breaking political taboos, showed how totalitarian government can devastate human love, but the lovers in the story do not even hold hands. Romantic love was also important in the nongovernmental, underground literary works like those that appeared in Today magazine; Shu Ting’s poem “To an Oak” is a good example. Later in the 1980s, literary depictions of romantic love gradually added more sexuality. One reason Zhang Xianliang’s 1984 novella Mimosa caused a stir was that it described sexual attraction between the male protagonist, a “rightist” intellectual banished to wander in the countryside, and a humble but healthy village woman who takes him in. But Zhang’s broaching of sex was only a minor part of his ideological critique. His broader purposes were to widen the scope for creative freedom by breaking down restrictions on writers and, beyond that, to highlight the hard fate of intellectuals in contemporary China. He also expressed a faith, which he shared with other intellectuals at the time, in “the proletariat-as-God”: his village woman from the lowest rungs of society offers her pure love and her lush body to save a down-and-out scholar, who finally gains official reprieve and “ascends” to a red carpet at the entrance to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where he is to attend a meeting. The 1986 film Hibiscus Town is another indictment of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Its love story between a hard-luck scholar and a shrewish village woman won China’s most coveted film prize. The example shows that, by that time, clandestine love between a repressed “rightist” and a “fallen woman” could already be viewed as a healthy sign of normal human feeling. Even the authorities accepted this view, as shown in their willingness to award a prize.

  During the same years, Freud’s theories on sexual desire spread on the mainland, and theories of the s
ubconscious influenced the ways in which writers handled the topic of sex. It became stylish for writers to “begin with a concept.” Wang Anyi, for example, wrote three novels about sexual attraction in 1986–1987, nicknamed the “three loves,” which once again showed the distortion of sexuality under totalitarian rule. When I read these works, I had the feeling the author was taking Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality as her guide to write about subconscious sexual drives. The reason Zhang Yimou’s film Red Sorghum (1987) was such a hit was that it drew so freely upon the themes of raw sexuality and adultery. Its theme song, “Sister, Be Gutsy, Go Forward,” was an unbridled endorsement of the primitive vitality of lust. Against the backdrop of fire-red sorghum in desolate northwestern China, under the broad blue sky and in full view of the bright sun, bandits violently abduct village women, wild adultery happens in the sorghum fields, bandits murder one another in competition for women, male laborers magically produce the widely renowned liquor “Six-Mile Red” by urinating into the heroine’s brewing wine, and so on. All of this dramatic plot arrangement and character design not only sets the scene for marvelous consummations of male and female sexual desire; it creates a broader dream vision that carries magical vitality. That Red Sorghum could win prizes symbolizes a change in national attitudes toward sex: erotic display had come to be seen as “exuberant vitality.”