No Enemies, No Hatred

by Liu Xiaobo

  Wang Shuo is a gifted storyteller and is especially good at using “cold” humor to evoke the pains and joys in the daily lives of little people. His heroes, who accept the label “riffraff” that the elites give to them, mock themselves, “play” with life, satirize pompous authority and enjoy ripping masks off gentlemen. Wang is, moreover, a wizard of linguistic chemistry. He can take the argot of hooligans from the alleyways of Beijing and brew it together with pretentious Communist jargon to produce his own special kind of language. He applies the black wit of the Beijing dialect to a red Beijing whose odor has already begun to change from spoilage. He uses alleyway vocabulary to needle self-proclaimed avant-garde literary heroes. His smart, frank, biting humor brings the fraudulent edifice of official pride crashing to the ground and shows that the “modern” pretenses of the intellectual elite, once the lids are removed, amount to practically nothing. In short, Wang Shuo invented a “new Beijing dialect” that devastates political and intellectual pretensions with equal flair.

  During the 1990s, Wang Shuo’s influence quickly permeated the entire cultural scene. It showed in television, film, literature, art, and criticism.

  Wang Shuo’s “Stories of the Editorial Office” led the way in satiric television and film. The family comedy “I Love My Home” by Ying Da and Liang Zuo was an early imitator, and then came a plethora of spoof-ridden historical dramas. Next came “Tall Tales of the Journey to the West,” starring Zhou Xinchi, and a number of Feng Xiaogang’s Chinese New Year comedies. In 2006, Ning Hao’s film Crazy Stone, although low-budget, was a huge box-office success.

  In the area of art, Wang Shuo’s sarcasm and Western pop combined to give rise during the 1990s to a “Chinese pop” that fed on mockery of the red classics. Wang Guangyi’s Cultural Revolution series, Liu Xiaodong’s “Joke” series, Zhang Xiaogang’s Mao-era “Extended Family” series, and a variety of performance and installation art are all examples of this trend. But the painter Fang Lijun is the best example in the art world of the spirit of egao in the years after Tiananmen. On the principles that “ugliness is beauty,” “stupidity is wisdom,” and “insult is elegance,” Fang created his “bald idiot” series, a wickedly incisive portrayal of China’s mood after the massacre. He shows imbecilic smiles as responses to shock, eyes that have glassed over from extreme trauma, and the self-abasement and self-taunting of people who are powerless to resist. [See, for example, his painting Howl, easily available on the Internet.—Ed.]

  In the early years of the twenty-first century, “sex-writing” [in Chinese, segao, which rhymes with egao—Ed.] took a lead in the mushrooming trend toward satire. Among the urban young, Wang Shuo’s “playing for thrills” gradually turned into “playing it cool,” and some of the best at playing it cool were the so-called pretty-girl writers such as Wei Hui, Mian Mian, and Muzi Mei, who highlighted sexual indulgence, spiritual decadence, and name-brand consumerism. Their coquettish language, fashionably sprinkled with Western-language terms, set a trend among the urban upper middle class. Muzi Mei’s sex diary and Jiu Dan’s documentary accounts of prostitution competed for popularity and set off an explosion of “sex-writing” on the Internet. Then the S-curves of Sister Hibiscus entered the scene, and the competition in sex-writing turned into one of the most conspicuous marks of the times.

  Sex-writing, which went hand-in-hand with “keeping mistresses”—another fashion of the times—startled people, but it also provided them, as they surfed the Web for diversion, with something they could easily laugh at. The young women writers who were addicted to their own sex-writing had blind spots that gave them a flamboyant kind of courage. They somehow imagined that they had been born with figures that would give nosebleeds to any male who laid eyes on them. They dared to present ugliness as beauty, dissipation as purity, and crudity as elegance. They dared to hawk their lower bodies as if oblivious of the self-mockery that it implied. In many ways segao, in my view, was just another version of egao. The main virtue of segao was that it exposed the secret that “men are bandits and women are whores”; it broke taboos about sex and upset the traditional notion that men must be dominant in sex. It threw all the old notions about young ladies and gentlemen into a trash bin—and, in passing, begged the question of whether there still are any young ladies and gentlemen in China these days.

  Sex-writing was not just a matter of Muzi Mei or Sister Hibiscus selling their lower quarters; it affected even the “zeal for the red classics.” In remakes of Mao-era classics like Shajiabang, Tracks in the Snowy Forest, and The Red Detachment of Women, trendy touches of the martial arts or sex—especially sex—just had to be added. The male heroes had to have macho sex appeal, and the heroines had to reclaim the “full feminine flavor” that Mao had not allowed. Lovers not only were wildly consumed by passion; they inevitably struggled with love triangles as well.

  Not long ago, officials became furious when they learned that netizens were planning to egao Lei Feng, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldier whom Mao Zedong had once elevated to be China’s foremost hero. In the Mao years Lei Feng had been “Chairman Mao’s good soldier” and a “good model for all the people of the nation.” The little book called Lei Feng’s Diary spread almost as widely as did Quotations from Chairman Mao. Now, three decades later, netizens were imagining a story about Lei Feng’s private life and preparing an online film that they wanted to call “The Girl in Lei Feng’s First Love.” When some of Lei Feng’s former comrades-in-arms got wind of the plan, they were outraged and petitioned the General Political Department of the PLA, who, naturally, viewed the question as one of utmost gravity and took it immediately to the Administration of Radio, Film, and Television and to the General Administration of the Press and Publication. Faced with an angry inquest from the PLA, the two bureaucratic offices were in no position to dawdle. An order to kill “The Girl in Lei Feng’s First Love” went out immediately.

  Another case of Internet egao—one that drew attention both in China and around the world—was the “Case of Liu Di” in 2002. Liu Di was a student in the Psychology Department at Beijing Normal University, where she had begun to write on the Internet under the unforgettable alias “Stainless Steel Mouse.” The authorities arrested her on November 7, 2002, “on suspicions of publishing reactionary opinions on the Internet and of forming a secret organization.” Thanks in part to international pressure, she was released a year later, on November 28, 2003, “on bail pending trial.”

  Liu Di had been very active on the Internet. She moderated popular chat rooms and ran a website called “West Temple Alley” that made an important contribution in the growing trend toward egao. Netizens drawn to satire of the pompous language of the Party-state formed a chat room at her site that they called “The People’s Daily Reading Group.” It attracted some posts of very high-quality egao. Its masterpiece in creativity was an online game called “Always Follow the Party.” This got too political, though, and involved too much risk of prison—as Liu Di’s own imprisonment shows.

  Among her friends, Liu Di was always known for her distinctive brand of humor. She was adept at satirizing rivalries inside the Communist Party—or the “meParty,” as its own idiom, and Liu Di, liked to put it—and her friends always looked forward to the laughs that she could provide. Her article “West Temple Persimmon Oil Party’s First National Congress Convenes at Nanjing,” for example, was a delicious spoof on the First Party Congress of the Communist Party of China. After Huang Qi, founder of “The Skynet Center for Missing Persons,” a website founded to track victims of human trafficking, was thrown into prison in 2000, Liu Di wrote another post, announcing that “Persimmon Oil Party Networms Collectively Appeal to the Party and the Government.” Her sardonic essay could not have been sharper in its indictment of the regime’s persecution of Huang Qi, but what she called for, in form, was that all networms in the Persimmon Oil Party, throughout the country, immediately turn themselves in to local organs of Public Security if they had ever posted anything “reacti
onary” on the Internet.

  Liu Di’s most famous article of this kind was yet another, one called “Let Us Take to the Streets to Spread Communism!” It exhorted netizens to bring “The Communist Manifesto” to the streets and preach its virtues. “Bring it to the people and get them to sign it!” she wrote. “Or you can do what those people passing out advertising flyers do—if there really is no one who will take them, then stuff them into the baskets of bicycles, or paste them onto telephone poles.” Liu Di’s year in prison for forming an unapproved organization did nothing to diminish her sense of humor. When released she punned on the English word party: “we can throw one, but not form one.”

  Egao as it has emerged today should be seen as an expansion of the Wang Shuo mode of literary sarcasm onto the vast new medium of the Internet.

  Political Humor in a Post-Totalitarian Dictatorship

  Some intellectuals are of two minds about things like Wang Shuo’s sarcasm and Hu Ge’s egao. They like the fact that egao subverts official ideology, but worry that it exacerbates cynicism. They are afraid that something that debunks the sacred and subverts authority, but does nothing more, is only destructive, not constructive. If such a trend spreads out of control, the price of sweeping out pompous authority will be creation of a moral wasteland.

  There is some truth in this. Egao in post-totalitarian China is a symptom of spiritual hunger and intellectual poverty at the same time. It can be seen as a kind of psychosomatic drug, something that works hand-in-hand with the vacuous comedy shows that the official media present, except that it can be even more effective than those in its power to anesthetize. People can get drunk laughing at one political joke after another that tells about suffering, corruption, and unhappiness. Jokes on such topics can become mere commodities to enjoy—as in “That’s a good one!” One could even say that the laughter egao induces is a heartless kind, something that buries people’s senses of justice and their normal human sympathies.

  But what might be done about this? What is the way out? China’s spiritual poverty certainly cannot be repaired by governmental order; it can come only through the availability of better-quality intellectual fare. Only when there is a free marketplace for ideas and values will true and false, and right and wrong, emerge for everyone to see, and only then can morality take hold and sophistry wither away. Only when differing value systems can coexist, cooperating where they have common ground and respecting differences where they do not, can society’s full creativity be achieved. We need to remember how the moral vacuum in China came about: it is the result of a systemic pathology, the determination of a dictatorship to suppress free speech, to instill official lies, and to enforce the biases of the rulers. It is these policies—not anyone’s laughter—that are the roots of the spiritual wasteland we see in China today.

  In my view, those who see the subversion in egao as merely destructive, not constructive, do not see deeply enough. I see political humor as an important and widespread form of popular resistance in post-totalitarian society. It played a similar role in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before the great change-over that occurred there. (Hundreds of Soviet and Eastern European political jokes still circulate on the Chinese Internet, by the way.) After the Tiananmen Massacre, political satire (we might also call it “soft politics”) in Chinese popular culture has shown a creativity, and an authenticity, that the solemn face of officialdom lacks. The people’s jokes spring from grassroots wit. Official discourse not only provides contrast for popular humor, but can be seen as its primary cause as well: the bland, oppressive face of official culture forces people into laughter, be it an idiotic grin or a wicked dagger of wit; the more serious the face of the government, the more people (can only) laugh.

  In a 2001 book called Carnivalesque Poetics: A Study of Bakhtin’s Literary Thought, Wang Jian’gang presents the views of the famous Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin on “cultural carnival,” including the role of jokes in society. “Carnival,” according to Bakhtin, has two sides: it is fraudulent, heartless, and vulgar; but it also expresses authentic feeling, feeds real creativity, and brings rebirth and renewal. In dictatorships, where control of daily life relies importantly on fear, it is especially important for rulers to maintain the threat that a solemn public atmosphere embodies. It is an atmosphere that makes official rule seem fixed, legitimate, even sacred. When “carnival” comes along, according to Bakhtin, the people at the grassroots, accustomed to their place at the receiving end of scoldings, suddenly become “fearless.” They produce a spontaneous logical inversion of the base and the noble, of up and down. They use parody, mockery, ridicule, and insolence—sarcasm of several forms—to vent their sentiments, but these are not simply negative sentiments aimed at knocking something down. Satire of what is wrong implies that something else is right; it tears things down for the sake of rebirth.

  In short there is no doubt in my mind that the benefits of egao outweigh the costs. It is useful to look more closely at what the experience of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe shows on these questions.

  After Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization brought “thaw” to the Soviet Union, the Soviet empire fell into what Václav Havel has called “the era of post-totalitarian dictatorship.” Resistance now came from two different sources: a handful of political “dissidents” issued bold and open challenges, while a silent majority brooded more quietly and occasionally pressed the borders of what was allowed. In the case of Czechoslovakia the difference can be seen by comparing Václav Havel and Milan Kundera. Havel was a hero of the “Charter 77” group that stood up to Soviet tanks, openly promoted a movement to “tell the truth,” became the symbol of popular resistance to dictatorship, and for these efforts won tremendous worldwide honor. Kundera, on the other hand, used subversive jokes to express the sour mood of resistance within the silent majority. Kundera’s first major work—The Joke—hit Czechoslovakia’s literary scene in 1967 like a bomb. It led the best-seller lists for a full year, seeing three reprints and selling several hundred thousand copies, before the regime banned it.

  Some people say that political humor tore the Iron Curtain down. This may be giving it a bit too much credit, but there can be no doubt that truth-telling and joking-making have worked hand-in-hand to dismantle post-totalitarian dictatorships. Both are crucial in “antipolitical politics.” Truth-telling politics is the open challenge offered by a few fearless people of conscience; joke-making politics is the private digging away at the base of the wall by the silent majority. Without the truth-tellers, there would be no open expression of popular resistance or of moral courage; without the jokesters, the words of the truth-tellers would fall on barren ground. If we say that Havel’s resistance exposed the inhumanity of dictatorship, lifted human dignity to a level where it had no fear of violence, and played an indispensable role in awakening the Czech people and mobilizing international pressure, then we must also say that the political jokes that circulated among the silent majority proved that people’s consciences were still alive, exposed the rot of post-totalitarian dictatorship for everyone to see, and made it plain that, sooner or later, the political decay would lead to an avalanche-like collapse of the dictatorship.

  Some will still say that, compared to the ways in which open truth-telling confronts a dictatorship, the indirect effects of private joke-telling leave something to be desired. Jokes can seem to be merely cynical venting, nothing that changes reality very much. But it is important to see how far-reaching the corrosive effects of political humor can be. They can reach everywhere that the political rot itself reaches, and that means into almost every nook of society. They show the true directions of popular opinion. They prepare the ground for things like “velvet revolutions.”

  Moreover, if and when a political collapse or major transition does occur, the fact that political humor has already been around for a number of years will likely ease the transition. In China, political jokes have already been making it clear for some time now that the legit
imacy of the dictatorship is unsustainable; this means that an end, when it comes, will not be so much of a shock. People will be able to take it more easily in stride, and this will have the benefit of reducing anxieties and lessening the likelihood that people will seek violent revenge. Because jokes had been letting them blow off some of their anger all along, they will have less accumulated anger to deal with. And in addition to all that, the positive values that have underlain political jokes (satire of what is wrong implies that something else is right, as we noted above) will be available for use after the transition.

  In a post-totalitarian dictatorship, the grins of the people are the nightmares of the dictators.

  At home in Beijing, September 18, 2006

  Originally published in Ren yu renquan (Humanity and Human Rights), October 2006

  Translated by Teresa Zimmerman-Liu

  YESTERDAY’S STRAY DOG BECOMES TODAY’S GUARD DOG

  CHINESE PEOPLE ARE TALKING EXCITEDLY these days about the rise of China as a great nation. First we spoke of an economic rise, then a cultural rise; we started spreading money around the globe, then exported soft power. There have been fads for reading the classics, for honoring the memory of Confucius, and for promoting Confucian ethics. China Central Television (CCTV), pressing to reestablish an orthodoxy in China, has used its program Lecture Hall to touch off a fad for reading The Analects. The government has put big money into “Confucius Institutes” around the world in an effort to spread soft power. The dream of ruling “all under heaven,” repressed for a century or more, is now resurgent and is taking Confucius the sage as its unifying force. The craze for Confucius grows ever more fierce.