by Liu Xiaobo
Superficial pride of the kind that bespeaks inner insecurity is evident in the frequent repetition of the theme that “we were once rich.” Television series highlight the majesty and prosperity of the Han (206 BCE–220 CE) and Tang (618–917) periods and the flourishing eras of the early Qing emperors Kangxi (r. 1661–1722) and Qianlong (r. 1735–1796). In addition to highlighting China’s former wealth, the spotlight shines as well on its glorious history of territorial expansion: the great Martial Emperor of Han tramples the Xiongnu barbarians; Genghis Khan gallops across Asia and Europe; Zheng He takes to the seas in the fifteenth century and reaches the Western Pacific; Kangxi and Qianlong expand China to include Taiwan, Mongolia, and Xinjiang; and so on. All this not only feeds nationalist vanity; it also revives the traditional Chinese worldview of China “at the center of all under heaven.”
China’s rise has become a steady refrain in the Western world as well. Comments from the West like “a formidable China is on the rise” and “the sleeping giant has re-awoken” ring constantly in the ears. This Western talk about China’s rise, added to the chorus of Western politicians and pundits expressing their wonderment, and to the stream of pro-China reports from prestigious international agencies, all does much to stimulate Chinese nationalism. Chinese people really begin to think of themselves as “a huge soaring dragon” or “a sleeping giant re-awoken.”
The Other Side of China’s Rise
China’s diplomatic and military power in the world of course is greater than it used to be. In fact, though, China remains far behind the free world in both hard power and soft power, and talk of its “surpassing the U.S. in twenty years” to become the world’s hegemon is nonsense. Westerners sometimes stir up the “China threat” as a way to warn themselves, but in terms of the actual world situation such a view is unnecessarily alarmist. China’s infatuation with its “rise as a great nation” is primarily a recoil from its feelings of extreme inferiority in earlier times, and it reflects only a superficial grasp of what the West actually is.
What is clear beyond question is only this: an autocratic regime has hijacked the minds of the Chinese populace and has channeled its patriotic sentiments into a nationalist craze that is producing a widespread blindness, loss of reason, and obliteration of universal values. The nationalist craze has already become standard stock for the dictatorship’s claims to hegemony, and that ancient mindset—that ignorant and frightening idea—of “China ruling all under heaven” is on its way back. Through these moves the regime has again led the nation to the brink of peril, causing a part of the Chinese population to lose the most minimal standards of critical thought and to mistake the illusions spun by the dictatorial regime for reality. The result is that our people are infatuated more and more with fabricated myths: they look only at the prosperous side of China’s rise, not at the side where destitution and deterioration are visible; they listen only to the praise that comes from Western countries, not to any of the criticisms. They will not face squarely the two great bottlenecks that hobble China’s development—its political system and its need for resources—and will not acknowledge the huge gap in both soft and hard power that still stands between China and the countries in the world’s mainstream.
The huge costs that China has paid in order to buy economic growth under the constraints imposed by its authoritarian political system have no match in what other nations, during their rises, had to pay. China’s economic boom is driven by the export of inexpensive products that are made in sweatshops where workers have no unions, no insurance, no legal recourse, in short no rights; the “maximum output whatever the cost” approach of the bosses creates massive waste of energy and wanton pillage of the environment.
Behind the Communist Party’s huge foreign purchase orders, including orders for sophisticated military equipment from Russia, lies the regime’s monopoly control of the hard-won wealth that properly belongs to the people of the nation as a whole, but it is wealth the regime can squander as it likes. Behind the spending sprees of Chinese tourists all around the world lies the extreme polarization of wealth that has resulted from the plunder of “collective” and “state” resources by a corrupt power elite. Behind the seemingly rock-solid stability of the social order lies increasingly bitter antagonism between officials and the people as well as the ever-growing pressure of rights-defense efforts that appear now here, now there, but never go away.
Most depressing is this: behind the superficial, arrogant nationalism lies a national ethic that is disconnected from civil values. It is more nearly a primitive jungle ethic of master and slave. In front of the strong, people act like slaves; in front of the weak, like masters. Feeling very bad when utterly bereft, they feel much better in the secure status of slave; then, after prospering as slaves, they have no time for anyone else, but borrow the mantle of their masters to assume airs of superiority. With this sort of national mentality, it will be most difficult for us Chinese, “risen” in the world, actually to become an independent and self-respecting people. We will be fit only to receive the indoctrination, deceit, and threats of our rulers—rather like children, alternately wheedled and deceived by words that their parents use to keep them in line. We will lack our own minds, dignity, and character, and have no way to walk or to think independently. The rulers will bribe us with small favors, threaten us with the lash, entertain us with songs and dances, and use lies to poison our souls.
The great powers in human history that rose as dictatorships—Napoleon’s France, Hitler’s Germany, the Meiji Emperor’s Japan, and Stalin’s Soviet Union—all eventually collapsed, and in doing so brought disaster to human civilization. The rises of Britain and the United States exhibit different patterns: these two countries, based on liberal constitutional governments, were able to avoid the turmoil of sharp ups and downs and to become great powers that enjoyed stability and national security over long periods of time. The British empire depended on colonialism, and with the fall of colonialism Britain reverted to the status of one country among others. The case of the U.S. is different. The U.S. rose in the twentieth century without relying on the occupation and plunder of colonial territory, but was built by supporting freedom, democracy, and national independence around the world, including independence from colonial rule.
Will China’s rise today take the German, Japanese, and Soviet Russian road of “the rise of a dictatorship,” or will it pattern itself more after the British or American “rise of a democracy”?
In China today, wide and growing differences of opinion on many issues between the government and people in society leave this question of how China will “rise” in deep uncertainty. The very rapid growth of the market economy and a broad awakening of people’s awareness of private property rights have generated enormous popular demand for more freedom. On the other hand, the government’s jealous defense of its dictatorial system and of the special privileges of the power elite has become the biggest obstacle to movement in the direction of freedom. No matter how long China’s economic growth can keep going, no matter how many Chinese cities come to resemble modern international metropolises in their outward appearances, and no matter how luxurious and modern a lifestyle the Chinese power elite can show off, as long as China remains a dictatorial one-party state, it will never “rise” to become a mature civilized country.
The international community ignores at its peril the fact that the contest today between Chinese Communist dictatorship and the free world is very different from the earlier one between the free world and the Soviet Communists. The Chinese Communists have abandoned their ideology and are not pursuing global military confrontation in the way the Soviets did. They are concentrating on economics, seeking to make themselves part of globalization, and are courting friends internationally precisely by discarding their erstwhile ideology. At home, they defend their dictatorial system any way they can, explicitly combating the “peaceful evolution” about which Western leaders have expressed hope and sometimes confidence. The
y use their bulging purse to buy “friendship” in dollar diplomacy throughout the world. Already they have become a blood-transfusion machine for a host of other dictatorships. Meanwhile they use the carrots and sticks of trade deals, and the lure of the huge market they control, to manipulate and divide the world’s major democracies. When the “rise” of a large dictatorial state that commands rapidly increasing economic strength meets with no effective deterrence from outside, but only an attitude of appeasement from the international mainstream, and if the Communists succeed in once again leading China down a disastrously mistaken historical road, the results will not only be another catastrophe for the Chinese people but likely also a disaster for the spread of liberal democracy in the world. If the international community hopes to avoid these costs, free countries must do what they can to help the world’s largest dictatorship transform itself as quickly as possible into a free and democratic country.
At home in Beijing, December 17, 2006
Originally published in Ren yu renquan (Humanity and Human Rights), January 2007
Translated by Josephine Chiu-Duke
TO ST. AUGUSTINE
For Xia, who likes The Confessions
St. Augustine
it was at the altar that I came to know you
I had to gaze up at the bishop’s red gown
to feel the majesty of the ages
And again in my neighbor’s pear garden
I met you
I spied a thieving child
and knew the joy of risk
Facing the silence of time
building the City of God
wanton in the embrace of women
exotic positions in endless number
completely immersed in worldly pleasures
you then fell headlong into the arms of God
There is no reason to doubt your confession was sincere
and every reason to accept your disdain of the flesh
but that child stealing pears and that youngster stealing love
also have the most instinctual reasons for human guilt
wild lust for wickedness and danger
I imagine you look down upon the grandeur of earth
mulling over your humility when you knelt in reverence
and I wonder if saints and gamblers
are really any different at heart
I hear God’s an expert at playing dice
so why, after all of your sensual indulgence,
did you choose sainthood over the bettor’s life?
Maybe you were the first to discover
the cruelty and mystery of time
and so feared to enter our brief human world
everyone longs for eternal life
and the desire for it may have crushed you, too
I wonder if confession truly makes one tremble
and if the road to atonement is really that long
in God’s stage drama people know how
to perform offerings of solemnity
does God like watching plays?
if God is just a tedious theater-goer
then the creation myth is nothing but a
crude practical joke
luckily, in your soul
there is another stage and a few puppets
But be silent
this is the only virtue of saints
stones have seen great ruin and are speechless
the sky looks down over all and is speechless
the earth buries all things and is speechless
the meaning of poems, faith, logic
silver-tongued humanity is a waste
believing in language is believing Judas’s promise
December 26, 1996
Translated by Nick Admussen
HATS OFF TO KANT
For Xia, who has never read Kant
I am so far away from that little German town
like a eunuch deep in a palace’s inner chambers
I can only peer at you through millennia of trash
see all the townspeople proceeding toward the church
hear all the churchbells ringing as one
just to mourn the death of a wise old recluse
there was none among them who could grasp the thing-in-itself
or follow the categorical imperative
When you were young you too were headstrong
you sought a rod to hold you up
charged with passion you created a world
the mystery of the night drew suddenly down
to threaten the infinity
which made you tremble
the meek tremble and are great
the great tremble and are meek
therefore, you understand
how humans must kneel in awe
of the infinite, the profound, the divine—
A fatal boundary
made knowledge bow its proud head
the break with tradition is bloodless
yet blanches the spirit terribly
as when God cast out humanity’s first ancestor
the tree heavy with its fruit of worldly sin
the crack reaches deep into the marrow
a wound almost impossible to perceive
but never healing, always fresh
and you, inscrutable bachelor
you turned philosophy into salt
I know you never married
how with the mischievous mind of a boy
you stayed up late nights wondering whether when you die
you’d still be a child
I imagine you approached the question as scrupulously
as you questioned the limits of knowledge
did the blade of knowledge castrate you
or did your body’s blade castrate knowledge
I know how you entered the sanctum of reason and experience
firm in your belief that critical philosophy
was like Columbus’s ship approaching the New World
how under the infatuated gaze of women
you paced your hermit’s room, self-deploring, alone
God chose you
to reveal the categorical imperative
your decrees oppressed humanity
and oppressed you
if Freud had been born two centuries earlier
beneath his mesmeric stare, your virginity
would have split into dreams of every color
spirits endowed with every poison
yet you were born too early
you escaped that fate
I do not know whether, for you
that was good fortune or ill
You stood in awe of the divine
yet you never evangelized or repented
walking into church was like opening an old book
playing child’s games with a grown man’s knowledge
laying out those indecipherable figures
behind you sky, clouds, sun
before you only darkness, bright as day
So much erudition and mystery
So much experience and clarity
heaped upon your grave
a bloodless murder
your hands spotless
your body, eroded by the refuse of thought
into a dubious monument
posterity gazes up through the smoke of its genocides
at those days of contemplation and perception
a broken language resurrected
this jetsam of syntax and vocabulary
reflecting you warping you hiding you revealing you
holding you aloft
a black hole at the center of the sun
December 17, 1996
Translated by Isaac P. Hsieh
THE COMMUNIST PARTY’S “OLYMPIC GOLD MEDAL SYNDROME”
IN THE SEVEN YEARS between Beijing’s successful bid to host the Olympics in 2001 and the opening of the Games in 2008, the government ran a nationalistic publicity campaign that emphasized “the Hundred-Year Olympic
Dream.” In the final year, as the countdown to the Games entered the home stretch, this campaign went into a sprint. The mainland media were saturated with PR about the Olympics. Once the Games started, a tidal wave of patriotic sentiment first focused on the lavish, dreamlike opening ceremony, then switched to an obsession with the gold-medal count.
Chinese state television—local stations as well as China Central Television (CCTV)—began tallying gold medals right from the first one that a Chinese team won. China led continuously in the gold medal count, and all channels kept constant track of the total. In the on-air commentary and in all of the reporting on the Chinese athletes, the impression that gold medals were everywhere dazzled the eyes and ears. In the tone of voice and expression of the announcers, and in the questions that reporters saw fit to ask of the gold medal winners, there was a constant sense that everyone was high on the opium of gold-medalism. Other than gold medals and the flag there were, well—gold medals and the flag! All of Beijing was resplendent in red and yellow! It was hard, by comparison, to sense anyone’s appreciation for the brilliant athletic performances themselves, and harder still to find any traces of the “Olympic spirit” or human values.
In the light-heavyweight boxing competition, when the Chinese boxer Zhang Xiaoping defeated the Irishman Kenny Egan to win the gold, CCTV anchorman Han Qiaosheng burst out with: “Our Zhang Xiaoping has knocked his opponent silly! His blows show the glory of Chinese manhood! We can talk with our fists, and in any contest can fight with brawn as well as brains! A legend is born! China soars! The Chinese dragon takes flight!”