Here, for example, is Murong Xuecun on the citizen who has entered a state of numbness: ‘If someone steals his food, he just goes hungry. If he is slapped in the face, he accepts it. If his home is destroyed, he watches. If his baby is terminated against his will, he simply cries. Any injustice is accepted as unavoidable; as expected, even. It would be abnormal if things were any different.’ The numbness also applies to other people’s fates. ‘If people are beaten, he just stands and watches. If people complain, all he can do is mock them. When people announce that they are going to commit suicide, he says: “Oh, they just want to be famous.” If no one speaks up for him, he accepts it. But if someone does, then he thanks the fates and says “Hey, that’s a stroke of luck!” If someone speaks up for him without success, then he pretends he always knew that this would happen: “A waste of time!” And if someone speaks up for him and is carted off by the police for it, he giggles and says: “Serves him right, the troublemaker.”’
When the numbness reaches an extreme level, the subject starts to hate everything that is good and fair. He thinks all idealists are hypocrites, and anyone who stands up for justice is a shameless opportunist, really just pursuing his own interests. A sense of moral inferiority triggers a defensive reaction in people everywhere. In the West, too, studies have shown that when one person in a group does the right thing, morally speaking, they attract hatred rather than admiration from their peers.138 Their actions show the others their own flaws and remind them that a different approach is possible. This dynamic can be observed in all societies, but it is especially noxious in places where suspicion of other people’s motives has become a matter of principle.
A hundred years ago, Lu Xun wrote about how readily subjects living under authoritarian regimes become slaves – out of fear, opportunism or numbness. ‘But today, most people don’t think they’re slaves; they think they rule the country,’ writes Murong Xuecun today. ‘Ever since they were little, they’ve been taught to be loyal to the collective, the Party, the country. There’s only one thing they’re not loyal to: themselves.’ In a country like this, it makes sense to deliberately steer clear of information. The Chinese are no fools, writes Chang Ping, who today lives in exile in Germany, and was the editor of the Southern Weekend when it was still the best newspaper in China. But, he says, many people are consciously choosing not to think. ‘Because thinking leads to understanding, and understanding only leads to trouble.’139
I’ve heard these thoughts expressed often. ‘The truly unlucky people in this system are the ones who have seen through it,’ a Beijing teacher told me. ‘The best thing is to carry on being one of those people who walk through life in a fog of confusion: then you’re safe.’ And the artist Ai Weiwei once wrote on Twitter: ‘As soon as you try to understand your motherland, you have set off down the path of crime.’140 Very few people have the courage to tread the suicidal path walked by civil rights lawyers and dissidents. For the rest, knowledge only makes living a lie more agonising.
On a trip to Taiwan with a party of Chinese tourists from Chengdu, I saw for myself the extent of people’s determination not to let potentially disturbing information get through to them. One member of the group worked as a Party secretary in a municipal authority. She was a young woman, fashionably dressed, with whom I had lively conversations about Taiwan’s night markets and its wonderful food. ‘We used to have great night markets like that in Chengdu,’ she said. ‘Sadly, they were all torn down.’ We were standing near the Sun Yat-sen memorial hall, waiting for our coach, when we were approached by an older man whom we quickly recognised as a member of the Falun Gong sect.
With its mixture of gentle exercise and eclectic teachings inspired by Buddhism and Taoism, Falun Gong drew millions of followers in the China of the 1990s, until the Communist Party started to feel threatened. The General Secretary of the CCP at the time, Jiang Zemin, banned Falun Gong and began persecute its members, sometimes in the most brutal way. In Taiwan, Falun Gong followers now deliberately position themselves in spots that they know Chinese tourists will pass, to inform them about the persecution of their fellow believers on the mainland. They carry placards and brochures bearing gruesome images of torture and organ removal, which they claim are scenes from Chinese prisons and camps.
We were standing on the pavement, then, when the man approached us. He headed for the young Party secretary beside me and thrust his brochures towards her. I saw the surprise in her eyes, which quickly turned to mild panic – but what happened next completely took me aback. First she seemed to freeze, then she put her hands over her ears, squeezed her eyes tight shut, and started to stamp both feet on the ground like a little girl, shouting: ‘I don’t see anything! I don’t see anything!’
All in all, it was a remarkable trip. It was the first time any of my tour group from Chengdu had been to Taiwan: the island that has gone its own way since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. For a long time, Taiwan was a dictatorship, ruled by the nationalist Kuomintang under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Then in the mid-1980s, the island took the first steps towards democratisation under Chiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo. To this day, the CCP in Beijing claims Taiwan as a province of China, but over the past three decades the Taiwanese have transformed their home into Asia’s most vibrant democracy, and they have no desire for reunification.
The Chengdu party were a thoughtful group, and after just a couple of days in Taipei they started bombarding the tour guide – and each other – with questions. How come people here are so polite and nice to each other? Why are passers-by so helpful, even though they don’t know you? Why is the traffic so orderly, unlike at home? Why does everyone, even the pedestrians, stop at red lights? ‘Well, we have made our own rules,’ the tour guide (a native of Taipei) said laconically. ‘And we just stick to them.’ My group was genuinely baffled by what they observed from the coach, and some were ashamed. Weren’t these people Chinese, too? Didn’t they come from the same culture, speak the same language, have the same black hair and the same DNA? And yet the Taiwanese treated each other so differently.
Taiwan is interesting not just because it’s a rare example of a successful, non-violent transition from dictatorship to democracy. It is also the living rebuttal of the CCP’s claim that the Chinese aren’t cut out for democracy. (Officially, Taiwan calls itself ‘Republic of China’ to distinguish itself from the communist ‘People’s Republic’ on the mainland.) During Taiwan’s transformation, it was fascinating to observe, close-up and in real time as if under a microscope, what the change was doing to society; to see what influence the new political system was having on the way citizens interacted. When I arrived in Taipei as a student in 1987, President Chiang Ching-kuo was on his deathbed, Taiwan was still officially a one-party dictatorship, and Taipei was an Asian city like so many others – exciting, ambitious, chaotic, colourful and dirty. The air stank, the traffic was always gridlocked, and of course no one ever stopped at red lights. Then came the first free elections, and the Taiwanese threw themselves into the project of democracy with a passion I had never seen in Europe. A society was beginning to stand on its own two feet.
I had an ‘Aha’ moment in March 2004, on the night of Taiwan’s second presidential election, which the former opposition leader managed to win. I was there as a foreign correspondent, and at around midnight I left one of the election-night parties where the supporters of the Democratic Progress Party were celebrating their candidate’s victory. It was pitch black outside, and hardly any cars were still on the road. I set off for my hotel and arrived at a set of traffic lights at the same time as a group of other people. The pedestrian light was on red. I did what I have done all my life in Asia (and what I’d always used to do in Taiwan): I ignored the light and carried on walking.
I’d taken three paces out into the road when something happened that I’d never experienced before. Someone called out: ‘Hey!’ – then again, louder: ‘Hello!’ I turned around. All the other pedestrians waited dutifully
at the lights. And the one who had called out pointed upwards. ‘The light! Red!’ There were no cars to be seen, but the Taiwanese had still stopped at the side of the road. I felt like the Chengdu tour group did a few years later: I was momentarily baffled. Then I was terribly ashamed, and trotted back to the pavement like a good citizen.
If you want people to stop at a red light, there are two ways of doing it. You can persuade them with total surveillance, cameras, big data and the sanctions doled out by a Social Credit System. Or you can give people responsibility for themselves and let a society make the rules it considers necessary for smooth day-to-day co-existence.
I would urge anyone planning a stay in China to add a few months in Taiwan or Hong Kong – especially if they want to discover what makes ‘the Chinese’ tick. Observing how Chinese communities live in a democracy under the rule of law sharpens the eye. You begin to differentiate what might be essentially ‘Chinese’ about the people in mainland China from those aspects of their behaviour that result from an interfering political system.
When state power is continually used to manipulate people, the first casualty is the human heart, says the South Korean ex-diplomat and academic Ra Jong-yil, who has written much about North Korea.141 ‘When totalitarian control of a society continues for a long time and when there are no alternatives open to the people except to adapt to the external coercion, the result is a kind of Stockholm syndrome on a national scale. People internalize the repressive system to improve their chances of survival, to facilitate accommodating what is inevitable. People not only go along with the system, they even really believe what they have to, what they are taught to.’ In China, you will often hear people defending the Party’s distortions of reality with utter conviction, no matter how implausible they are. These people don’t know any better. Except that a lot of the time they do, and are just pretending.
The art of dissimulation becomes second nature when you live under an authoritarian regime. It is true that some people will completely absorb the lies via osmosis and eventually forget the difference between lies and truth – but they will always be in the minority. Most people wear a mask, which they sometimes keep on even within their own four walls: if their children go to school and repeat something they heard at home, it could get them into trouble. ‘The state chooses what’s mainstream, and you have to conform to that. If your ideals are not mainstream, then you’re wrong,’ the young entrepreneur Wang Sicong, who makes his money from online games, told the BBC: ‘Why is online gaming becoming so popular in China? Because once you go online, you can take off that mask and say whatever you really think rather than what is mainstream.’142 Wang Sicong is the son of the real estate mogul Wang Jianlin, who for many years was the richest man in China.
Mei you anquangan. ‘There’s no sense of security here.’ Everyone bobs and weaves; no one keeps still. Is that dynamism? Perhaps. Above all, though, it is a kind of mass nervousness. In today’s China, the uncertainty seems even greater than it used to be. In Europe, material gains have brought a feeling of security, at least for those who have joined the middle classes. Not here. People in the cities are vastly wealthier than they used to be. At the same time, the pressure they are under has risen exponentially. Property prices have shot up much faster than salaries. An engineer at the iPhone manufacturer Foxconn in Shenzhen worked out for me, on the tablecloth of a pizzeria a short walk from his factory, how long he would have to work in order to buy a two-room flat in the neighbourhood. It was more than 200 years. He had a degree from the university in Harbin.
So far, there are only the beginnings of a functioning welfare state. ‘If one person in the family gets cancer, it’s enough to drive the whole family into financial ruin,’ I was told by a friend in Beijing, an ad-man on a good salary. ‘They call people like me “middle-class” now, but the term has a very different meaning from the one it has in Europe.’ Another acquaintance, a PR manager for a large chain of restaurants, agrees: ‘No one feels secure here, no one, no matter how much money they have. In Germany, you live; here in China, we run for our lives.’
The pace of change and the pressure of competition in the new China is one problem. Another is the nepotistic system inherited from the old China, which makes it impossible to navigate life’s major challenges – finding a school for a child, or a hospital, drugs and blood-transfusions for a mother with cancer – according to simple rules that apply to all. At every turn people will have to draw on their network of connections, show that they know the right people, call in favours. People don’t have rights they can invoke, or courts that will protect them; nor do politicians feel accountable. After the devastating explosion of the illegal toxic chemical store in Tianjin, right next to a high-rise development inhabited by well-off citizens, a much-shared essay on Weibo contained the following passage:
Obviously, if you live in a nice house in Binhai with a BMW and a little dog, in your free time you twiddle your fancy worry beads, or else you go for a run and get your exercise in. You maintain a noble silence on any public incident you’re aware of. On the surface, you look no different from a middle class person in a normal country.
But this is a delusion. One explosion later, and the homeowners in Qihang Jiayuan and Harbor City discovered they’re the same as those petitioners they look down on, making the same moves: kneeling and unfurling banners, going before government officials and saying ‘We believe in the Party, we believe in the country.’ This method has been used by countless petitioners – people from the provinces who make five- or six-hundred yuan a month and receive chemical fertilizer subsidies. The homeowners realise, much to their embarrassment, that after an accident there’s really #nodifference between us and them.143
We are all the underclass. The autocratic state is a minefield for every individual living in it. No matter how much money or power you’ve amassed, no one is safe. The laws are deliberately made so that everyone breaks them every day. And in the end, you can’t rely on them anyway. If the Party has decided it’s time, then even the bosses of the biggest companies can vanish overnight. The same fate can befall any Party functionary, no matter how far he has climbed up the ranks. Life at the top of the Party can be ‘nasty, brutish and short’.144 Invariably, corruption is the official charge levelled against those who have been arrested, but in reality taking bribes, tax evasion and smuggling are misdemeanours that almost everyone in China’s elite has committed to a greater or lesser degree. They are only used against you when you find yourself on the wrong side in the game of power.
Overnight, Party figures whom the propaganda machine once painted as halo-wearing guardian angels become black-hearted devils. Lu Wei is a good example. For years, he was the head of the Cyber Administration, silencing China’s bloggers and setting up the World Internet Conference for Xi Jinping. He was courted by Mark Zuckerberg and in 2015 was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. The day after his arrest in February 2018, the Party press revealed to the astonished public that this same Lu Wei had always been a ‘shameless’ and ‘tyrannical’ person: ‘He exchanged power for sex. He used his position for personal gain and had numerous properties given to him as gifts. He betrayed every single important political principle. He is a typical hypocrite. His case is extremely bad and particularly serious.’ Not long afterwards, I was invited to the Foreign Ministry on an entirely unrelated matter, where a civil servant revealed to me in passing that he had worked for Lu Wei ten years previously. ‘Even then,’ he said, ‘we all knew what a bad apple he was.’ If this was true, how come he managed to rise through the ranks for another ten years, all the way to the top of the Party and the nation?
It is the irony of such a system that not even the autocrat himself can be sure of his freedom or his life. Day and night he is plagued by fears of all those rivals he suspects are secretly planning their revenge for the day after he is toppled. In China there is an ancient four-character saying that captures the ruthlessness of such po
wer struggles: Ni si wo huo – You die, I live. Perhaps this explains why Xi Jinping has altered the constitution so that he can rule for life. Even for him, nothing less can guarantee a basic level of security.
THE IRON HOUSE
How a Few Defiant Citizens are Refuting the Lies
‘The refusal of one decent man outweighs the acquiescence of the multitude.’
Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, c.100 BC.
Imagine an iron house. Large, windowless, indestructible. A lot of people are asleep inside the house, not realising that they will soon suffocate. You know that certain death awaits them, but you also know they won’t feel any pain. ‘If you cry out now to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, and make those unhappy few aware that they will suffer the agony of an irrevocable death – do you think you will have done them a good turn?’
The lines come from Lu Xun. He talks about how he wrestled with his conscience before publishing his first story, Diary of a Madman, in April 1918 – a milestone for China’s emergent modern literature. It is in this story that the term ‘feast of human flesh’ is used to describe China. ‘There are the lofty and the lowly, great and small, the top and the bottom. You are mistreated, but you can also mistreat others; you are eaten, but you can also eat others.’ What do you do with this knowledge: call out to the people who are trapped in Lu Xun’s iron house? Do you try to free them? Against all reason? ‘If a few of them wake up, you cannot tell them there is no hope of destroying the house.’
Lu Xun decided to write. He wrote and he cried out, trying to wake the sleepers with his words, and in 1936 he died. A few years after his death, a new set of people took over the house; people who had initially entered to wake the sleepers themselves. ‘Arise! Ye who refuse to be slaves!’ the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China begins. But since they moved into the house, they have reinforced the iron walls and are now filling in the last remaining cracks.
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