We Have Been Harmonised

by Kai Strittmatter

  China doesn’t have a long history of intellectual social critics speaking truth to power. Mao had a particular hatred of intellectuals, whom he called the ‘stinking ninth class’. He never forgot the condescension with which they had once treated him, a library assistant and the son of peasants. The gentleman scholars of ancient China had always had a share of power; they looked on the emperor as an equal and practised a special loyalty. The old books told these scholars that they should speak the truth to a ruler who had gone astray, but the emperors’ tyrannical cruelty ensured that most stayed mired in moral cowardice and opportunism.

  Sima Qian was the Herodotus of ancient China, the most famous historian the country has ever produced. In 99 BC he experienced at first hand what a single wrong word could cost a person. Sima Qian’s crime was to defend a general before the imperial court, calling him a brave man, even though he had capitulated to enemy troops. The emperor had Sima Qian castrated. The scholars, intellectuals and writers of the millennia that followed learned from examples like this – and generation after generation chose to castrate themselves figuratively. Today, the overwhelming majority still tell the rulers what they want to hear.

  ‘Why are cynicism and shamelessness so widespread in China today?’ asked Professor Li Chenjian, Vice Provost at Peking University, in an essay that was widely shared before being deleted.145 ‘Our education system produces genteel, sophisticated liars, not defenders of truth.’ Li calls on his colleagues not to sell their dignity and independence. The author is not brimming with hope for the future, but nor does he hold the ‘cowardice and meanness of human nature’ alone responsible for the sad state of affairs. In today’s China, according to Li, even people’s right to remain silent has been taken away: ‘They are forced to join the jubilant chorus.’ The essay did the rounds in March 2018. A few weeks previously, Peking University had opened its newest faculty: the ‘Centre for the Study of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’. Dozens of other universities had already rushed to set up similar research centres. ‘What has happened to the glorious tradition of [Peking] University?’ the historian Li Ling asked with a sigh.146 A university should be producing the country’s elite. ‘Those who only know [how] to wait on leaders and bosses are not talents, but slaves.’

  Is it surprising, then, that a writer like Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, made his peace with censorship and the apparatus of persecution? Or that he complied without protest when the Party commissioned him to pay tribute to Mao Zedong’s infamous 1942 ‘Yan’an speeches on literature and art’ for a celebratory jubilee book? For a fee of 1,000 Yuan each, Mo Yan (whose pen name means ‘Don’t speak’) and other Party-endorsed authors wrote out Mao’s statements, which the Party had used for decades as guidelines for its persecution of artists and writers. In graceful calligraphy, they painted the poisonous words of the Great Chairman, which had once brought torture and death to so many of their colleagues. Nor should it surprise anyone that Mo Yan remained silent on the fate of the other Chinese Nobel laureate, the essayist Liu Xiaobo, whom the state left to waste away in prison until he eventually died of cancer. How many people would have Liu’s unbending will and courage in the face of death? If we are surprised by anything, it should be the fact that this country can still produce people like Liu Xiaobo. ‘It will take a few great men to compensate for the weakness and cowardice of the masses; our country needs moral giants,’ he wrote in a letter to the poet and author Liao Yiwu, who now lives in exile in Germany.147 Moral giants are a rare species in any society.

  The voices of the other China still exist, even if they can hardly be heard these days. There are the people who protest, the people who cannot help but speak the truth, and the people who refuse to sing with the jubilant chorus. Those who remain decent in the face of indifference and open hostility.

  The sinologist Geremie Barmé has been tracking down these voices for decades. ‘During periods of political darkness such as today,’ he says, they are ‘like magma coursing under a hardened mantle’.148 They are the resistance: the writer who adds the redacted sentence back in, even though he knows it will be removed again. The journalist who has been fired, speaking out on Weibo even though he knows his voice will only be heard for a few minutes. The lawyer under pressure from the state security services, who stubbornly persists in taking the law and the constitution at face value. The ordinary citizen who decides to open her mouth for the first time in her life, like Beijing resident Zhao Xiaoli who was so shocked by Xi Jinping’s alteration of Article 79 of the constitution (allowing him the possibility of lifelong rule), that she published an extraordinary essay online.149 She appealed to all the clever satirists and whispering critics in China to stop camouflaging their anger and their criticism – the time had come to break free from metaphor and be direct. Yes, she was afraid, she wrote, but ‘because this is intolerable, the furthest extreme of intolerable, I will no longer be silent. I will not satirize or use sarcasm. I will not complain. I will not use metaphor. I will clearly express my point of view … In exchange for silence, rulers have repeatedly trampled the power of the people underfoot. For silence, we have the endless lust for power of dictators and autocrats. Silence has brought about the proposed amendment to article 79 of the constitution. For silence, we get the boot from 1984, stamping our faces forever.’

  They’re just individuals, but the Party still sees them as a substantial threat. ‘Words still have power. Spoken words are more powerful than secret opinions. Words made public are more powerful than whispered conversation. Explicit opposition is more powerful than metaphor,’ she writes. An attempt to step outside the lie, even if it is only made by a seemingly weak individual, is an attack on the whole construct of lies. ‘For the crust presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff,’ wrote the Czech dramatist and dissident Václav Havel in his essay The Power of the Powerless. ‘As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, “The emperor is naked!” – when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game – everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.’150

  In 1977, Havel and his friends had called the declaration upon which their opposition was based ‘Charta 77’ – and it was no surprise that three decades later, following in Havel’s footsteps, Liu Xiaobo drafted a ‘Charta 08’. No surprise, either, that the Party immediately incarcerated him.

  ‘Actually, all I ever wanted to do was speak the truth. No more and no less. To live in truth, as Havel put it. Isn’t that an innate urge for everyone?’ the civil rights activist Hu Jia once told me. ‘But living in truth doesn’t just mean being honest with yourself and others; here in China, it also means seeing society and the system clearly for what they are.’

  The only way I could conduct this interview with Hu Jia was over the phone; it was approaching the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the security services had him under house arrest. When I asked him how many people in this country actually managed to live in truth, he told me about the arrest of his friend, the author Yu Jie, by security service officers at the time of the Arab Spring. ‘They said to him: “In the whole of China there are no more than 200 influential critics of the Party like you. If our Party is ever under serious threat, we can take you all away overnight and bury you alive. No one will miss you.”’ Hu Jia laughed. ‘So there are those 200, at least.’

  Simply telling the truth is what makes people like Liu Xiaobo and Hu Jia a danger to the Party. In a state like China, people who resist are the last reminder that another life is possible. They must therefore not only be silenced; they must also be smeared and vilified as moral or sexual degenerates. That is one purpose of the public shaming sessions on state television, where bloggers and civil rights lawyers are paraded before
the cameras after their arrest, forced to denounce each other and finally ‘exposed’ as greedy fraudsters and sexual predators. The moral giants must be shrunk and turned into squalid gnomes for the comfort of the masses. They’re no better than we are.

  Saying out loud what others can’t say, or don’t dare to. That’s what makes the dissident into a dissident, as Václav Havel wrote. And his ‘most positive and maximal programme’ is the simple defence of humans and humanity. There aren’t many of them left, and the Party is so dominant that their actions come across as Don Quixote-ish madness.

  ‘What we do know for sure is that this machine, increasingly, can do whatever it wants. The monster is fully grown,’ wrote Xiao Meili, a Beijing women’s rights activist born in 1989, on her WeChat account in 2018, referring to the security apparatus:

  There are people who left comments to ask me: ‘Why didn’t they go harass other people? Why did they only harass you? What is the matter with you?’ And I understand: when people are living in an environment where resistance isn’t allowed, they can easily long to believe in the powerful. Otherwise how do they deal with their situation? It takes courage to accept the truths of the world that one lives in.

  From time to time, some people would say to me: ‘You all shouldn’t be that radical. Don’t provoke them. Only then can we get things done.’ But you’d be radical, too, if you didn’t have all these other people in your way[…]

  I asked my friend Lu Pin, ‘What should we do in this ever more terrible environment?’ Lu Pin said: ‘Live on. Outlive them. Only then can we see hope.’ Yes, we need to live on with healthy minds and bodies. And I hope we can grow too. I want to use their words to document our flesh and bones. In a cyberspace full of hostility, I hope to carve out enough room for a hug, and build some trust between people that cannot be easily broken.

  This is why I wrote down these stories.151

  Perhaps Mao Zedong was right, and a spark really is all it takes to set the whole steppe alight. In a bed of cold ashes, the brief glimmer of these sparks stops the last hope from being extinguished. And there are still the children, as Lu Xun wrote in 1918, who have not yet eaten human flesh. ‘Save them, save the children!’

  THE GAMBLE

  When Power Stands in its Own Way

  ‘Obey the Party!’

  Inscription on mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival in September 2015

  Some of the Party’s plans read like science fiction. But it isn’t the first time communism has dreamed of a digital rebirth. Soviet computer scientists were doing that more than half a century ago in Kiev and Moscow, having discovered cybernetics.152 They, too, worked on high-tech fantasies designed to replace ideologically undesirable phenomena (at that time, the free market economy) in the Soviet system, which was heading for crisis.

  The cyberneticist Victor Glushkov presented his ‘National Automatised System of Administration of Economy’ (OGAS) in 1962, with the aim of achieving ‘electronic socialism’. Glushkov wanted to set up a nationwide computer network, linked by the country’s phone lines to every factory and company in the command economy. It would be the smart nerve system of the Soviet economy, giving feedback in real time, enabling rational decision-making processes and even the invention of an electronic currency. In the end, Glushkov and his colleagues failed very prosaically, when their plan was crushed by scheming ministers and bureaucrats.

  This time, the launch conditions are better. Crippling bureaucracy and scheming ministers exist in China too, of course, but the tailwind blowing from on high is strong. Even so, Xi Jinping has taken a huge gamble. Will he manage not only to reinvent dictatorship, but take it to the heights he is currently dreaming of? In 2049, its 100th anniversary, will the People’s Republic of China be that ‘modern, prosperous, strong, democratic, civilised, harmonious and beautiful country’ about which Xi Jinping gushes to his people and to the world at large? Will it be under the leadership of an ‘even stronger’ Party, ruling over all known points of the compass and those yet to be discovered? A country ‘at the centre of the world’, with a model of strong leadership and a booming economy that will become ‘a new alternative for other nations’, and boasting a ‘world class’ army, ‘ready for battle’? Will it work? Or is the system itself becoming its own worst enemy? There are indications that the latter may be true.

  Will there still be a People’s Republic in 2049? Or a Party? Xi Jinping would be 96 – not a wholly unlikely age, given the general longevity of the red aristocracy. Xi’s father Xi Zhongxun died at 89; Mao Zedong lived until 82; and Deng Xiaoping until 92.

  The Party has past experience of reincarnation. This is something that sets it apart from all its communist brother-parties. It’s why the CCP is still alive and ruling, while the others have passed away or been twisted into caricatures of their former selves. Its first two rebirths – shortly after Mao’s death in 1976 and then again, to a lesser extent, following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 – were extraordinarily successful, against all the odds. The Party showed just what it could do: overcome the laws of nature, defy gravity. It could import capitalism and at the same time remain true, if not to the idealist Marx, then certainly to the power-hungry Lenin.

  That was the service Deng Xiaoping performed. The Chinese people embraced globalisation and created an economic boom, with miraculous growth rates that seemed even more miraculous because of the destruction that the Chinese Communist Party had wreaked upon the country, leaving a very meagre economic base from which to start.

  Crucial to Deng’s achievement was that he kept politics off the people’s back to an unprecedented degree. He condemned the Maoist cult of the personality and ruled that the Party should be led by a collective. He even started to talk about the separation of Party and state, at least in the years before 1989; and he granted new freedoms to society outside the realm of economics. Hence the much-vaunted pragmatism of China’s Communist Party, its legendary ability to change and adapt. And hence the boom that Xi Jinping inherited, upon which he is building his dream of the ‘rebirth of the great Chinese nation’.

  Today Xi is breaking with all of this. He is bringing back ideology, drawing all power to himself, suffocating experimentation. Once again he is sealing China off from the world; once again he is placing the all-seeing, all-knowing Party at the heart of things.

  But Xi Jinping is no Mao Zedong, and he certainly isn’t just another central Asian kleptocrat. He really does have a vision for China. Many Chinese people admire him as a strong man who fights corruption and is making their country into a proud nation. The mix of nationalism, siege mentality, and dreams of superpower status pumped into the people by the propaganda machine is highly effective. As long as the system avoids a major crisis, Xi – like other autocrats before him – will no doubt feel confident that his freedom- and information-starved people are behind him.

  Nevertheless, at the start of Xi’s second term in office, there were signs that absolute power has its own self-defeating logic, driving Xi Jinping and the Party to do themselves and their plans more harm than good. Before Xi, even the more liberal sections of the middle classes were prepared to accept the Party’s rule, as long as it provided some of the advantages enjoyed by open societies: increasing wealth, a functioning administration, the expansion of modern infrastructure, growing freedom in their private lives.

  In China the social contract has always been unwritten, but – at least for the urban population – that didn’t make it any less real. Hope and optimism have loomed large in the emotional lives of those growing up in China over the past 40 years. Things were getting a little better every year, and that made people believe in the future. This eternal hope also helped to ensure that there was very little rebellion over the environmental devastation, the obvious inequality, and the shameless corruption of a greedy elite. For a long time, however ignored or disadvantaged you felt, you could take solace in the thought that tomorrow would be your day. Or at least your children’s day.

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p; The belief in a better future – better partly because it would be freer – has remained a constant. ‘We look at each new leader like the sickle of the new moon,’ a liberal writer said on the occasion of the Mid-Autumn Festival in 2012, shortly before Xi Jinping took office. ‘We are filled with confidence that this time he will grow round and full. And we never give up hope, even when one leader after another disappoints us.’

  Three years into Xi’s rule, mooncakes suddenly appeared at the Mid-Autumn Festival. They were being handed out by the police, and had the characters ‘Obey the Party’ stamped on them. And three years after that, Xi Jinping had the constitution changed to allow him to remain president for life. The number of searches on Baidu containing the term ‘emigrate’ shot up. Five years had passed since Xi started dismantling the freedoms of Chinese citizens, piece by piece – but it was this move that shattered something for many people. Now their hope had gone, and they finally stopped believing in the Party’s pragmatism, its will to reform. Yes, they had been living under a dictatorship, but at least it had been trying to institutionalise its rules and procedures, trying to make its exercise of power more predictable, trying to take account of conflicting interests. When the Party’s willingness to experiment, to be flexible and adaptable, became a thing of the past, the pillars of political stability began to crumble.

  Xi Jinping brought back consistency – but it is a merciless sort of consistency. The China of recent decades had been a country of chabuduo. Roughly translated, chabuduo means ‘more or less’; something like ‘cutting corners’. Chabuduo meant that laws often weren’t enforced a hundred per cent; that the censors didn’t always look at things too closely; that the authorities frequently turned a blind eye. It was the Party’s way of giving breathing space to a society that was increasingly self-aware and sophisticated. And for many people, it fed the illusion of freedom.