Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  The second time I saw Wang Chaohua, she was standing at a slight distance from a Chinese student demonstration outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles on a gray, humid day, with rain threatening to burst from oyster-colored clouds. It was the middle of May 1999, a week after U.S. bombers hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and precisely ten years after the hunger strike on Tiananmen Square. About a hundred Chinese students were singing against the roar of freeway traffic, small figures in a large, indifferent landscape of parking lots and billboards advertising American affluence. This time it was not the “Internationale” or “Descendants of the Dragon” but the Communist Chinese national anthem. There were placards protesting “NATO barbarism”; there were one or two Americans in worn denim jackets handing out leaflets of a Trotskyite organization, and there were a few Serbs, dressed in suits, smiling at this show of solidarity with the Serbian people. But the Serbian people were not really the point of this demonstration. Chinese patriotism was.

  I was offered several theories for the bombing of the embassy. A young woman with moist, angry eyes said the U.S. wanted to “keep China down.” I said surely the bombing had been an error and the Chinese government was manipulating public opinion. “The Chinese people are not stupid!” she screamed. “Our feelings of sorrow and indignation are sincere!” But President Clinton had just apologized. “Not sincerely!” shouted various students at the same time. “It’s the CIA,” opined a young man in a blue jacket. “It’s Brzezinski,” said another. A pretty woman wearing a black armband said the U.S. was trying to divide China. I asked her what she meant by that. “Washington supports Tibetan independence,” she explained. Surely not officially, I said. But what about Taiwan? she countered. The U.S. was splitting Taiwan from the motherland! When I observed how close all this rhetoric was to that of the government in Beijing, I was told that this time the Chinese government was on the side of the people: It was allowing the people to show their true feelings.

  But these “true feelings” were volatile, swinging from xenophobia to hostility against the Chinese government and back to xenophobia again. Some of the same people standing in front of the Federal Building in Los Angeles had been demonstrating in Tiananmen Square ten years before, demanding to be recognized as patriots. The Chinese government had to protest the U.S. bombing. Otherwise the students might easily have turned their outrage on the government itself—for allowing foreigners to humiliate China. When it comes to patriotism, it is never quite clear who is manipulating whom. Only one demand remains constant, whether it comes from patriotic students, intellectuals, or their Communist rulers—the demand for a show of sincerity.

  Wang Chaohua was standing quietly on the grass beside the freeway, watching the scene through her thick glasses. I was eager to know what she made of this melancholy affair. She was her usual skeptical self. She believed that the students in China were set up against the foreigners just as the Boxers had been by the Qing government in the 1890s. On the other hand, she thought the bombing surely couldn’t have been an accident. There had to be more to it. And besides, she was against using force against force, so the bombing had to be condemned. I disagreed, and told her so. But later that evening I began to understand the source of Wang’s deliberate caution and her horror of violence. She had not yet told me the whole story of her life.

  Wang was fourteen, a pupil at one of the best schools in Beijing, when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. Few of her classmates came from a proletarian background. Wang’s father was a famous professor of Chinese literature at Beijing University. Naturally, as soon as Mao unleashed the young against their elders, Wang’s father was “struggled against” and denounced as a “stinking reactionary.” He was beaten and made to kneel while his arms were yanked behind him in an excruciating posture known as the airplane. He was spat on and humiliated for days. Wang’s elder brother led a raid on his own father’s house with other Red Guards, but then took pity and tried to protect him. But Chaohua, a rebellious teenager, did not. Her rebellion was blessed by Chairman Mao himself. This chance was too good to miss. So while her father was bent over a ping-pong table, she stood there, at the head of a baying mob, screaming examples of his oppressive and reactionary attitudes. For six years she disowned her father, as though he were a piece of dirt staining the revolutionary credentials of his family. She was blinded by “the Red Guard mentality.” Later she tried to apologize to him, but her father waved her away. It was all right, he said; she was “just a kid”—the same words she had used about the Tiananmen student leaders.

  We were sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Santa Monica when Wang Chaohua told me this part of her story. After she had finished, she stared silently at the fried squid on her plate, fidgeting with her plastic chopsticks. I remembered the documentary in which I had first seen her face. This was the second time I saw her eyes filled with tears.

  “What is a dissident?” Dai Qing, the journalist who had pleaded with the students to retreat in 1989, often asked me this, and then she would add, with a mocking smile: “Do you think I’m a dissident?”

  I would usually meet Dai Qing in a café on 16th Street, near Dupont Circle, in Washington D.C. We were colleagues at the same research institute. Not that Dai Qing was an exile or a refugee—far from it. She was proud to remain based in Beijing, and, like me, was in Washington only for a year. She rather despised those Chinese who had left China to carry on their dissident activities from New York, Cambridge, or Washington. She thought they were out of touch, too far removed from the cultural hearth. To be away from China was to go soggy, become irrelevant.

  Dai Qing has strong opinions. But is she a dissident?

  She had certainly annoyed the government enough to be arrested after the Beijing Massacre (for “bourgeois liberalization”) and kept in prison for a year. She resigned her Party membership just after the massacre—not, she was quick to point out, as “an anti-Party act” but to distance herself from politics altogether. She had been loyal to the Party, in her own way; but, as with Liu Binyan, her public criticisms of government policies marked her as someone with an independent mind. So the students hated her for trying to muzzle their protests, and the government hated her for being a critic. After her year in jail, which had been relatively comfortable, compared to the treatment of more hard-core dissidents, she was allowed to travel abroad, give interviews to foreign journalists, take up fellowships, and receive foreign prizes, but nothing she wrote could be published in mainland China. Hers was a confusing status, restricted as well as privileged. But then, in a way, it always had been, and Dai Qing was convinced that neither I nor any other foreigner could ever understand China. It was much “too complicated.”

  And yet time and again she tried to explain what was wrong with China, with the government, and with the “radical” students, who had, by their “extreme” behavior, made things so much worse than they had been before 1989. She would make a fist of her right hand and smash it into the palm of her left hand, like a boxer. This, she said, is the Chinese mentality, this eternal desire to have all or nothing, this refusal to compromise, this thirst for confrontation, the tendency to do or die. And this is why she blamed Chai Ling and Li Lu, and all the other “extremists,” for provoking the bloody debacle on June 4. They had no idea what democracy was. Once more, the fist came crashing into the palm of her hand. Chai Ling “doesn’t understand compromise through negotiation. She thinks that compromise is like being a traitor. That is a Maoist mentality.” Dai Qing was convinced that the student radicals and the Communist extremists shared similar goals: The students wanted power through revolution.

  I watched Dai at the café. She looked out of place in this gay enclave of Washington, a short Chinese woman in her fifties, dressed in sensible Beijing clothes. Her large, curious eyes, set above a small, flat nose, took in the male couples in tight shirts and skimpy shorts walking by with their pet dogs, chattering in the overloud manner of Americans at leisure. She looked amused and utterly detached,
like a person gazing at animals in the zoo. America didn’t really matter. Although she was physically present in Washington, D.C., her mind was always in Beijing.

  Since the early 1980s, Dai Qing had been a reporter for Guangming Daily, a Beijing paper favored by intellectuals. She had agreed to work there as long as she did not have to write about government meetings, which bored her. Instead, she would travel and write about what she saw. And what she saw was often not pretty: forest fires run out of control because of official incompetence; demoralized Chinese soldiers from the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1978; shoddy, potentially catastrophic plans to build the gigantic Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze River; and so on. She was brave to write about these things. But it took even greater bravery to dig up, as she did, the histories of early Communists who had fallen foul of the Party and were consequently deleted from history, as though they had never existed. These “historical investigations” made her famous all over China. Her story of Wang Shiwei, a Communist intellectual who dared to criticize the abuses and hypocrisies of Communist leaders before the revolution and was purged, denounced, and finally executed in 1947, caused a sensation. But then, as Dai Qing once said6, when all is darkness, the smallest ray of light will cause a sensation.

  Dai Qing is a proponent of free speech. This alone makes her a rebel in China. But it does not necessarily make her a democrat. Democracy is of course a much abused concept. Most people say they are in favor of it. Dai Qing, too, claims to want a democracy in China, as do many so-called liberals and reformers inside the Communist Party, but only after a slow process of educating the people, building a “civil society,” developing a middle class, all of which will take many years, perhaps as much as a century. Meanwhile, it is best to maintain a regime of benevolent authori-tarianism, lest people lose control and bring about violent disorder. Democracy, for Dai and reformers like her, one feels, is a bit like the final dissolution of the state in Marxist utopianism: a fine but distant ideal. China is too big, they say, and the Chinese are too poor. And there are too many of them. Chinese history is too ancient and too complicated for democracy to take root.

  The effect of Tiananmen, in Dai Qing’s opinion, was to make China’s authoritarianism less benevolent. Conveniently provoked by the student extremists, government hard-liners carried out a purge of reformers and liberals. Dai had seen it coming. Indeed, she thought the hard-liners had been manipulating the students to their own nefarious ends all along. That, she says, is why she had wanted the students to stop their provocations. But there was another, perhaps more important, reason for her advocacy of retreat. She put it very clearly in an account of her year in prison7: “. . . I feel that revolution—that is, overthrowing a system—is far more frightening than maintaining the present political order, and the damage a revolution would cause to China would be far greater. It is for this reason that from 28 April I advised the students to go back to class. . . .”

  Moderation at all costs, avoid any disorder: This is part of a Confucian tradition as much as utopianism—perhaps more so. Extremism in Chinese history is rooted more in folk religions and millenarian rebellions than in the Confucian search for the golden mean. But the problem with moderation at all costs is that it is of limited use if you wish to get rid of a despotic system of government. It can become a form of tortured appeasement.

  One night, Dai and I were having dinner at Gong Xiaoxia’s house. The news was bad that day. There had been a crackdown on a newly formed political party in China, the so-called China Democracy Party. Several men, who had not advocated violence or revolution but had simply insisted on the constitutional right to free association, were given jail sentences of more than ten years. I asked Dai what she thought of this and was astonished by her reply. It was a very good thing, she stated with an air of supreme confidence, for this way the mistakes of 1989 wouldn’t be repeated. This time there would be no extremism, and that would enable reformist policies to proceed. I could not decide whether she was being harsh or simply naÏve. Yet naÏveté is the last thing I would have suspected. Her background, complicated even for such a complicated society as China, certainly suggests otherwise.

  Dai Qing’s parents were early Communist intellectuals, and joined the Party in the 1920s. Both were arrested by the Japanese during the war; her mother was released, her father executed. To make life easier for her mother, Dai Qing was adopted by Marshal Ye Jianying, one of the major figures in modern Chinese history, the man who “liberated” Beijing after winning the civil war. As the adopted daughter of one of China’s “Ten Great Marshals,” Dai entered the highest aristocracy of Chinese communism. She can still remember seeing Chairman Mao push young girls up and down the dance floor, his big feet stomping like a soldier’s on parade. She had become one of the chosen few.

  Trained as an engineer in the 1960s, Dai worked on intercontinental ballistic missiles before joining the Cultural Revolution as a Red Guard. Her mother was denounced as a traitor, and tortured horribly in struggle sessions. Dai was still full of revolutionary zeal, but seeing her mother’s suffering led to a bizarre kind of revelation, rather like Gong Xiaoxia’s reading Solzhenitsyn. When her mother was tortured, no one offered any help, even when she was half dead. No one cared, or dared. No one, that is, except for one man, a class enemy, a nonperson, denounced and struggled against himself; he was the only person to offer her comfort. It dawned on Dai for the first time in her life that “class enemies” could be decent human beings.

  In the 1970s, Dai worked on surveillance equipment for the Ministry of Public Security. She became an expert in hidden television cameras. After she secured a job in military intelligence, she also began to write. She joined the Chinese Writers Association and was instructed by her bosses to make contact with foreign, mostly Eastern European, writers and spy on them. This is how she met the American reporter Studs Terkel. She liked his interviewing technique. But her cover was blown in 1982, when a list of spies found its way to the CIA. Dai left the Writers Association, as well as the army, and became a reporter. This suited her. Adopted by the elite, Dai always felt she was something of an outsider, connected to the highest circles and trusted by no one. Now she would be a kind of oral historian, like Studs Turkel, of Communist China. She would try to be independent, without ever quite leaving the fold.

  Dai describes herself as a “liberal.” Her heroes in history are those who dared to criticize their rulers and paid the price. Chinese history is full of such heroes. The Cultural Revolution was set off by the performance of a play featuring Hai Rui, a noble minister in the Ming dynasty, who lost his position because he presumed to criticize the emperor. Parallels were drawn between Hai Rui and critics of Chairman Mao, and Mao, with his keen sense of history, spotted the danger. The playwright, Wu Han, was denounced and later bullied to death in 1969. This happened soon after Dai Qing, as a Red Guard, wrote an essay about her ardent wish for a science that would enable all young people to transfer their youth to Chairman Mao to give him a longer life. It was perhaps an unconscious variation of Taoist beliefs—held by the Chairman himself—that frequent sex with very young girls adds years to the life of an old man.

  I asked Dai what she meant by the word “liberal.” She laughed, thought about it for a bit, and then carefully formulated an answer. A liberal, she said, is a person who thinks independently and values free speech more highly than anything else.

  In this sense, Dai Qing might be called a liberal, but she also fits an older, more traditional Chinese model: the virtuous Confucian scholar who offers critical advice to his rulers. It can be a noble model, but is almost always a conservative one. The common people are treated with benevolence but are considered too unruly to be trusted to participate in the way the state is governed. This is a caricature, to be sure, but one that fits the period leading up to 1989, the decade of reform, when “liberal” intellectuals, who had been through thirty years of murderous persecution, were at last reinstated by Deng Xiaoping into something resembling their traditio
nal role as advisers, or scholar-officials, contemplating the future of China in think tanks, university seminars, and semi-independent study groups. Their patrons were the reformist Party leaders, first Hu Yaobang, then Zhao Ziyang. They were given back their dignity, their status, even a degree of independence, as long as they did not presume to challenge the political order. It was an ideal period for an intellectual who liked to be at the center of things, patronized and protected by Party leaders, and a critical outsider as well. Ideal, but in the end untenable; you cannot be protected and independent at the same time.

  The relatively benevolent though hardly democratic rule of reformist leaders gave “liberal” intellectuals the illusion that incremental change might work, that the Communist Party would gradually open up and reform itself, that intellectual freedom could coexist with benevolent authoritarianism—the word used by General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang was “neo-authoritarianism.” You could, in Gong Xiaoxia’s words, “play with the beast” and use the Party leaders to change China, but it was a game that exacted murky and illiberal compromises. This is how Dai Qing described it in a speech she made in 1988, to commemorate the men who had tried to change China ninety years before, through political reforms8: “You have to negotiate with them, make allies, compromise, make concessions, and even be prepared to sell out your principles for a good bargain. . . .”