Empire of Lies

by Guy Sorman

  His generation, the third in the movement of democratic resistance since the 1949 Revolution, runs less of a risk than the previous one. Yu Jie has so far not suffered anything worse than interrogation in a police station, a relatively mild form of intimidation. With his writer’s pince-nez and baby face, the authorities don’t take him seriously: he is a lone intellectual with no organization. His only weapon is his pen, his army his readers: students, young graduates, girls and boys of his own age. This has spared him the Party’s wrath: the scrupulousness of a writer poses no threat; an organization does. But the Party disapproves of too large a readership. Yu Jie’s publishers are under constant pressure to reject his manuscripts or to limit the number of copies; sometimes, they are obliged to close shop.

  Yu Jie is neither a fighter like Wei Jingsheng nor a commander like Wuer Kaixi. His writing, full of sensitivity, appeals to the soul of China, the subject of his books. He invites us to read again the literary works of the twentieth century so that we can revive the humanity and individuality of authors and their characters. The contrast will bring out the extent to which the Communist Party has dehumanized a society—a society that has enslaved its people, denying them their very identity and truth. Yu Jie discovered Alexis de Tocqueville, well-known to “rightist”—in other words, non-Marxist—intellectuals, and translated him into Chinese. Tocqueville’s analysis of the French Revolution seemed to apply to the history of China. Yu Jie wrote an essay on this parallel.

  In The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Tocqueville showed how the French Revolution was the outcome of the ancien régime’s inability to reform itself. Yu Jie says the same holds true for China. First in 1898, when the Empress Dowager rejected the rule of law that her reformist ministers were pressing for: that may well have preserved the Chinese empire by transforming it into a constitutional monarchy, as in Japan. Then in 1989, when Deng Xiaoping rejected the democratic reforms proposed by the students. In the long run, this second rejection could prove to be the Communist regime’s undoing. Tocqueville’s observation on France holds true for China as well: revolutions destroy the elite. The educated class, once the nobility of China, could not survive the 1949 Revolution, and it has never managed to reconstitute itself. There are scholars, but they are maintained by the Party; the institutions employing them severely curtail their freedom to think, express themselves, or even come up with the new ideas that China so badly needs. To ensure their submission, the government pays them generously, a reversal of the situation that prevailed before Tiananmen. Until 1989, economic hardship led academics to support the idea of revolt. Given a relative degree of material comfort, they tend to become conservative, favoring, at most, slow change.

  Yu Jie does not lead the youth of China; he represents it. Political struggle holds no appeal for him; taking on the Party machinery is suicidal. Wei Jingsheng’s time is over. The old combatant belonged to the bygone era of the Cultural Revolution, when good and evil were clearly defined and choices easy to make. China has changed, and so has the Communist Party, no less cruel but now more subtle. The democratic revolution that Feng and Wei had hoped for will not take place. The police and army successfully nip in the bud any protest movement. The urban population knows little of the struggles raging in factories and villages. Cities are cut off from the countryside; information is tightly controlled. Local uprisings remain restricted and will never amount to a revolution. Even the Internet is censored. So is China doomed to remain permanently under the control of the Communist Party? No: change will come, and human rights will triumph but not through a revolution or a change of heart of the Party. “The Party will never change. It will do everything possible to cling to power, including calling out the army; change will come through moral redemption.”

  In this Year of the Rooster, conversations turn quickly to morality, religion, and the spiritual void and how to fill it. The Chinese, true, have always been religious (mystical, superstitious, as you like); they have never lived far from temples or gods. The Communist Party destroyed the altars and exterminated religious orders, but Mao Zedong was quick to provide the people with another altar at which to worship: that of his divinized persona. So instead of the sacred texts, the Chinese were given the Little Red Book, which they had to repeat the way Daoists repeated their prayers and the Buddhists their mantras. The regime also supplied substitute saints, the martyrs of the Revolution celebrated by the clergy of the apparatchiks. Under Mao, every single Chinese had to confess his or her sins against the regime. Maoist monotheism, the cause of so much suffering, held the people in a vise-like grip. When Mao died, veneration of him stopped, and Marxism, existent only because Mao personified it, faded away. The Chinese were left without religion or ideology; the only agenda they had was the “get rich” program of Deng Xiaoping. But consumerism cannot give meaning to life, and only a minority currently reap its material benefits. Will the Chinese return to their traditional faiths?

  Yu Jie rules out the old religions. Corrupted by centuries of political power, Daoism and Buddhism are not in a position to lay down a new moral order. As practiced by the Chinese, both these religions are more instrumental than spiritual, more immanent than transcendent: people invoke Buddha or the Immortal to get concrete benefits, not to renew mankind. Fresh inspiration will come from Christianity, whose universalism is obvious. The Catholic Church, though, is a bureaucracy, with a hierarchy similar in a way to that of the Communist Party. Because of its bureaucratic nature, the Roman Catholic Church has met with little success in China—no more than 10 million believers after a century of missionaries. Yu Jie thinks that evangelical Protestantism is the most suitable form of Christianity for China: no pastor, only reading the Bible and direct communion with God.

  How was Yu Jie converted? His wife, a beautiful young woman, answers in his place: “God chose me.” She converted five years ago at the University of Beijing. The numerous Protestants and English teachers from the United States discreetly help in this campus evangelization. The yearning for morality that Yu Jie talks about is perhaps one reason for the movement’s popularity. Another is that intellectuals are taking a close look at why China lags behind other nations. What explains the superiority of the West? Science and democracy, said the students in May 1989, just as they did on May 4, 1919. But was not Christianity the bedrock of Western civilization? Many Chinese think so, making them lean toward this form of Christianity. Is this similar to the traditional quest for elixirs to prolong life? Is Christ an elixir—or a revelation? So closely interlinked are these elements that no one—neither we nor the new faithful—can make a clear distinction between them.

  Two years after Yu Jie’s wife was chosen, Christ elected him. The young couple—both barely thirty—belong to Bible prayer and study groups. People gather twice a week in an apartment rented for the purpose. Is it a secret temple? Sometimes a pastor comes and helps out inconspicuously. He belongs to Wenzhou, the Chinese Jerusalem and a high spot in the history of evangelical missions. Who congregates? There are students, academics, and professionals. Is evangelical Protestantism the religion of the new elite, confined to posh localities? The movement is, in fact, widespread: some 40 million home evangelists congregate in these house churches, unfettered by any control. In addition, there are the 20 million “official” Protestants of the patriotic communities recognized by the Party. Yu Jie says that these 60 million Protestants and 10 million Catholics are enough to form the critical mass that will tilt the balance in favor of human rights. We need to remember that Christians played a major role in the democratization of Asia: Sun Yat-sen and Kim Dae Jung, the first democratic president of South Korea, were Catholics; democratic leaders are often Protestant in Taiwan and Catholic in Hong Kong. Yu Jie dreams of a new Martin Luther King emerging from the evangelization of China, showing a radically new way for his countrymen, far removed from ordinary Chinese practices, riots, and revolutions.

  This evangelical religion is spreading across the world, gaining more adepts
than any other religion. Though it originated in the United States, its Americanness is not so certain. Chinese rebels accept being attracted to American civilization; becoming evangelists gives them the feeling of participating in the American dream of an individualistic and democratic society. The personalized nature of this religion, in which each individual becomes his own temple, adds greatly to its appeal. Beyond Party control, the personal temple gives one the strength to confront it. Yu Jie says, “Without Christ, I could never have withstood the ten to fifteen hours of grilling I am often subjected to.” The police keep interrogating him to divert him from his mission.

  But with Christ by his side, he lives without fear “in the light of the truth,” pushing back constantly the limits of censorship. In August of the Year of the Rooster, as the government celebrated the 1945 victory of the Communist Party over Japanese fascism, Yu Jie published in Hong Kong a text recalling that Japanese fascists had killed far fewer Chinese than had Mao Zedong. “As long as the body of that assassin lies in the center of Beijing, it is unthinkable that the civilized Olympic Games will be held there.”

  Look at Yu Jie, says the Party. He can say what he wants. What more proof do you need of freedom of speech in China? But Yu Jie cannot get his work published in China because of censorship. Had it not been for his fame, especially in the United States, he would be behind bars. Until the Olympic Games in 2008, this young writer will be able to express his views in relative safety, for the Party fears that, if they arrest him, American human rights organizations will boycott the games.

  The Party is scared of mice

  The length to which the Party goes to keep a watch on a few isolated democrats is amazing. These people have no army, no organization; their only links with the outside world are their computers. The mighty Chinese government is so afraid of what Miss Liu Di thinks and writes that she wound up in jail for a year, once more without trial.

  Liu Di is a student in Beijing; she is in her twenties. Petite and nearsighted, she has taken on the cyber nom de plume of “stainless steel mouse.” She translates into Chinese the texts of dissident writers from the former Communist Europe, including those of Václav Havel and the Polish journalist Adam Michnik, and posts them on a website called “Liberty and Democracy.” The Security Department had deemed her dangerously subversive. Her site is blocked, inaccessible to Internet users. Freed after protests by human rights lawyers, she remains under surveillance. I had to make several attempts to meet her. The police tap her telephone, and each time we set an appointment, they stopped her from leaving the house. Those classified as “enemies of China” are kept under house arrest at the discretion of the Security Department. Some cyber-dissidents are less fortunate: in 2003, He Depu was sentenced to eight years of prison for suggesting the creation of a democratic party on his website.

  Bewildered by all the attention the Party was giving her, Liu Di concluded that it was not as invincible as it appeared and had no backbone: “Sometimes, even high-ups are scared of mice.”

  I got the feeling that this stainless steel mouse was unaware of the risk she was running. What the Party really dreads is a mouse turning into a Václav Havel. The Soviet experience panicked the Party and had it scrambling to study the circumstances that led to the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and more recently, Ukraine and Georgia. In each case, they found a single fatal error that the Party had to avoid at all costs.

  In the Soviet Union, the error was introducing political reforms before economic reforms. There had been nothing fundamentally wrong with the country, in this view; it was only Gorbachev’s inept handling of the situation, his conceding the establishment of political pluralism, that proved ruinous. This convenient analysis side-stepped the real reasons for the Soviet Union’s disintegration.

  As for Poland, had the Communist Party banned unions and muzzled the Catholic Church, the country would have remained communist. This is the uniform opinion of the Chinese press and what is told to the cadres in the Party schools, which train those cadres to think identically. So the Communist Party keeps a close watch on religions, especially the Catholics who obey an external authority, and clamps down on unions to prevent a Chinese Solidarity from emerging.

  In the Czech Republic, the Party had been foolish enough to let liberal intellectuals spout their pernicious philosophy unchecked. The Chinese Communist Party knew better.

  Georgia is the latest victim to fall to democracy.

  The Party dispatched a few experts from the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, who concluded that nongovernmental organizations, some supported by American foundations, were the real culprits.

  This was the view of the Communist Party in the Year of the Rooster. Consequently, all forms of association and the merest outline of civil society come under scrutiny. NGOs, even environmental ones or those fighting against AIDS, were banned. The paranoia extends to preventing Beijing and Shanghai apartment block co-owners from holding their assemblies. This could lead to associative autonomy, the Party believed; it must be controlled by the Party or else eliminated.

  Obviously, such a superficial analysis of the downfall of communism in Europe fails to take into account local complexities. It avoids all discussion on the nature of totalitarian regimes—another taboo subject in China. By ascribing the failure of communism to mere ineptness, the Party deludes itself into thinking that it will last forever. Instead of devising strategies to stop the rot, it chases mice. Mice may be unable to overthrow the Party. But Liu Di and He Depu clearly show where the future lies.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wild Grass

  Until the age of sixty-five, Gao Yaojie worked as a doctor at the hospital in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan. Hers was a well-ordered existence. Then, one day in 1994, her life overturned completely when two peasant women from the Shangcai district came to her clinic. Gao was surprised to see them. Henan is one of the poorest provinces in China, and peasants from the region hardly ever consult a doctor. They don’t have the means to do so; there is no hospital, no clinic, not even a doctor in the countryside. And the Zhengzhou hospital where Dr. Gao headed the gynecology department meant a 200-mile journey for both women.

  Ten years later, she still remembers vividly every detail of that visit; it changed her life in ways she could never have imagined. She found her life’s mission, one that continues to guide her and will do so until the end of her days: she works single-mindedly to save China from an AIDS epidemic, hoping that it is not already too late. Despite her age, a weak heart, and frail legs, her energy is boundless. So deep is her commitment that she has written many books and posted innumerable articles on the web about unfortunate AIDS victims left to die in the villages of Henan. For her efforts, Gao has incurred the wrath of the Party and become what in political parlance is called “wild grass.”

  “Weed out the wild grass!” Mao Zedong issued this directive to Communist Party workers in 1959 after a brief moment of intellectual and artistic freedom. “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” Mao had said. They did—and a petrified Mao slammed the lid on them. In fact, the “hundred flowers” period turned out to be a deadly ploy to hound out intellectuals and artists who had been most vocal in criticizing the regime. Mao decreed that 10 percent of them had to be “weeded out” of society; they were to be sent to labor camps or executed. Terms such as “bad elements” and “purging society,” other legacies of the Cultural Revolution, are still used today. “Bad elements” and “wild grass” are counterrevolutionaries who cannot be reformed. When the Party wants to send out a strong message, it eliminates them; when it wishes to appear more moderate, as in the Year of Rooster, it isolates them. They are put under house arrest, frequently taken into custody or imprisoned without trial so that they do not proliferate and contaminate the healthy body of society. The problem is that you can never quite get rid of wild grass; it grows back as soon as it is weeded out.

  Gao against the “blood heads”

  The two Shangcai
peasant women had made up their minds to go to a hospital only because their fever was unlike anything experienced in the villages of Henan. Hepatitis, dysentery, and tuberculosis were common, but this kind of fever and extreme fatigue did not correspond to any of the known pathologies. Dr. Gao was quick to make her diagnosis: both women had AIDS. Dr. Gao was hard put to understand it. Of course, she had heard of AIDS, but this was the first time she had actually seen a case, and she found it difficult to believe that the disease could exist in Henan.

  In the early Eighties, when AIDS was first detected in the United States and later in Europe, the Chinese Ministry of Health declared it proof of capitalist dissoluteness. China, said the Ministry, was immune to such a disease. When some cases were detected in China, they were quickly put down to drug addiction (especially in Yunnan, where heroin is injected frequently) and homosexuality (in the large cosmopolitan cities like Shanghai and Beijing). Gao was a puritan and the wife of a Party dignitary; so she had accepted the official version unquestioningly. As they never stop saying in China, AIDS is “a dirty disease.”

  The case of the two peasant women was perplexing. On examining them, Gao noticed that needle pricks covered their arms. They said that they had been selling their blood regularly, twice a week on average, for the last ten years. This was their main source of income, as was the case in all the other villages of the Shangcai district. Gao began to piece together their story. She happened to chance upon one of the many scams going on in China. Hundreds of thousands of people had been contaminated in selling their blood. Gao undertook to find out how the epidemic began and how it spread. What she learned made her fear that AIDS would affect the entire country by 2005.