by Ian Buruma
River Elegy, then, is a battle cry for intellectuals to heal China’s ills with their enlightened Western ideas. Every educated Chinese recognizes the phrase “science and democracy.” It formed the slogan of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which began with a patriotic student demonstration at Tiananmen (not yet the monstrously large square it is today) against Chinese territorial concessions made to Japan at the Versailles Treaty negotiations. This became a wider cultural rebellion, not unlike the cultural self-criticism of the 1980s, which called for a remake of Chinese society along scientific, democratic, Western lines. In the 1920s, the great writer Lu Xun denounced the Confucian tradition in masterful essays dripping with cultural despair. (Later, Liu Binyan and Bo Yang followed his example, though with less literary finesse.) Western ideas, often filtered through Japan, were all the rage. George Bernard Shaw came to China in the 1920s and found a receptive audience for his arguments in favor of state socialism. John Dewey spent three years in China and influenced such thinkers as Hu Shih with his pragmatic liberalism. The socialist Chen Duxiu coined the phrase “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy,”14 and argued that “only these two gentlemen can cure the dark maladies in Chinese politics, morality, learning, and thought.” Chen went on to found the Chinese Communist Party but was later brushed out of the history books and vilified as a “Trotskyite” when Mao took “scientific socialism” to far greater extremes.
Confidence in the traditional cosmic order had already begun to show cracks in the nineteenth century, when Western military and technical prowess made China look hopelessly backward. But the sense of crisis in the late Qing era arose from more than technological inadequacy; it was also the result of moral, philosophical—indeed spiritual—despair. Some scholar-officials reacted by advocating extreme conservatism: The Confucian empire had to be sealed off at all costs from foreign contamination (or “spiritual pollution,” as Deng Xiaoping would call it a century later). Peasant rebels, on the other hand, reacted by joining cults. And some intellectuals, excited by new ideas from Europe, the United States, and Japan, wanted to dismantle the old order altogether. What all these factions had in common was a holistic attitude to statecraft. Politics, morality, religion, and philosophy were part of the same package, called China. This is what lies behind the radicalism described by the journalist Dai Qing. When all under heaven becomes unstable, there can be no middle ground between iconoclasm or xenophobic isolationism, between building ever higher walls or total destruction.
The makers of River Elegy often described themselves as the heirs of the May Fourth spirit—as did the students in Tiananmen Square, all of whom had seen and been excited by the television series. A scholarly adviser to the series, Jin Guantao, told me in Hong Kong that the film was part of China’s “second wave of enlightenment.” When I mentioned Yuan Zhiming’s views on Christianity, Jin reacted vehemently. Christianity was part of the Chinese folk tradition, he said, the “small tradition.” River Elegy was proposing something quite different. And yet, I think, the leap for Yuan Zhiming from advocating science and democracy to becoming a Christian evangelist was not as great as it might seem, for River Elegy, in Jin’s words15, called “for no less than a spiritual rebirth.”
I called on Yuan Zhiming at his house in Torrance, not so very far from the church in Glendale. It was a bungalow on a cluttered palm tree–lined street. The houses had seen better days. Paintwork had faded, walls were cracked. Bruised cars were parked in the driveways, some with spare parts strewn carelessly around them. It was a warm spring day. Yuan’s cramped living room was still decorated with a lonely Christmas tree. Tacked on the wall were strips of red paper, with Chinese homilies about the importance of sincerity and faith.
Yuan said he had often been plagued by doubts. He began to read Karl Marx after the Cultural Revolution, when he was in the army. The world described by Marx did not correspond to the world Yuan knew. It was the same story I had heard from others who had challenged the official orthodoxy: The gulf between what people could see with their own eyes and the idealized version of reality they were told to believe in became intolerable. After his army service, Yuan studied philosophy in Beijing. When he wrote the text for River Elegy, he was an active booster of Zhao Ziyang’s policies of freeing the Chinese economy to allow a certain degree of capitalist enterprise.
But what about Zhao’s political views? Yuan studied his delicate hands, folded them carefully in his lap, one on top of the other, as though they were a pair of soft white gloves, and answered indirectly. He listed four types of Chinese reformers. Some like the Western lifestyle, he said, but not the system. Some like the economic system but not the politics. Ah, I thought, Zhao Ziyang. Some, he went on, like everything about the West except religion. And some embrace everything, including religion. He himself was of the last persuasion. I thought of the most extreme proponents in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of westernizing reforms in China, and also Japan, some of whom had advocated abolishing the Chinese or Japanese languages and replacing them with English. Unlike the Tiananmen students of 1989, however, Yuan does not speak much English.
“That is why,” Yuan continued, “River Elegy was fundamentally superficial. It left out the most important thing, the core of Western civilization, which is Christianity. Without that, you cannot have democracy or human rights. We Chinese studied Western economics and politics but not the deepest thing of all, the Western faith.”
I could not presume to know how “sincerely” Yuan believed in Christianity. But listening to him, in his house in Torrance, California, I felt that he was not so very far removed, in manner or thought, from the Confucian tradition that his enlightened, democratic, scientific movement was meant to rebel against. If his Christianity had simply been a personal matter, that would have been one thing. But the desire to convert the entire Chinese people was troubling, for Yuan had discovered a new dogma, a new correct way of thinking to impart to the ignorant masses. That was his way of saving China.
If so, it is an odd paradox, for the main appeal of Christianity, over the last hundred years or so, to many Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Japanese, is that it provided an egalitarian challenge to the Confucian tradition. It promised to break the hierarchies that dominated East Asian societies. Christian activists like to think that universal and unconditional love are essential to the establishment of democratic freedom. That is why rebellions against dictatorships have often been initiated and led by Christians. Sun Yat-sen, the father of China’s republican revolution in 1911, was a Christian convert who believed, as he put it in a speech in 1912, that “the essence” of the revolution “could be found largely in the teachings of the church.” The role of the church in the former Soviet empire as a refuge for anti-Communist dissidents hardly needs to be pointed out; it was the one alternative dogma left to challenge the official one. The trouble is that when messianic Christianity is harnessed to political rebellion, it can easily end up replacing one form of oppression with another. The Christian authors of River Elegy have not reached that stage. They lack the power. And in fact their zeal, like so much Chinese idealism, is a form of anti-politics. It is more an expression of their despair about politics.
The Sheraton Hotel coffee shop in Flushing, Queens, is possibly the only public place in North America where everyone still smokes. There was a blue haze swirling about the place as I walked in to meet one of Yuan Zhiming’s co-authors on River Elegy, Xie Xuanjun. Xie lives in Flushing, New York City’s other Chinatown. While the old one, in downtown Manhattan, retains some of the fetid atmosphere of Kowloon sweatshops, Flushing looks more like a raffish part of Taipei. The smokers in the Shera-ton’s coffee shop, nursing colorful soft drinks, were mostly young Taiwanese, the men dressed in silky Italian jackets and the women in leather miniskirts. A strong smell of perfume mingled with the cigarette smoke. And the Muzak was unmistakably East Asian—sugary and loud.
Xie is a pale, thin man with the sad eyes of a dog that has had one too many beatings. Like
Yuan, he does not speak much English. He makes a living writing articles about economics for the press in Taiwan. His road to Christianity was longer than Yuan’s.
Xie Xuanjun’s participation in the Tiananmen Movement had been indirect and peripheral. During the 1980s, he was one among many intellectuals in a network of think tanks and research groups who had tried to carve out some room for critical thinking. There was nothing religious or spiritual about his participation in River Elegy. Like Yuan, Xie was concerned with economic reforms and “civil society.”
Religion, too, began as an intellectual interest for him. Xie read the Bible when he was working in a factory as a twenty-year-old victim of the Cultural Revolution. He was not encouraged at home, for although his mother had been educated in a Catholic school, she believed only in “science and democracy.” He began to reflect on the differences between Christianity and Confucianism and Buddhism, and concluded that China lacked a spiritual creed that was suited to life in the secular world. Buddhism was entirely otherworldly and Confucianism purely secular. Only Christianity, it seemed to him, could be both. While he was wrestling with these ideas, he was also haunted by that centuries-old Chinese question: What had gone wrong with China? He read not just the Bible but also Spengler and Toynbee, the twin prophets of Western decline, who have given East Asian intellectuals such solace over the years.
Out of the resulting confusion emerged some interesting explanations for China’s decline. First Xie thought it was because of the Chinese obsession with unity. China, he argued in River Elegy, had been at its best when it was divided. Look at Europe: Divided since the seventh century, it had flourished. Unity was the problem, unity and the patriarchal system. China, he said, is like a society of monkeys: The dominant males treat the rest as subservient women. It is still like that, even in the overseas Chinese democracy movement: Wei Jingsheng is the man, and others, male and female, are treated like his women. And in Tiananmen Square, many Chinese thought the protest was doomed as soon as they saw Chai Ling as the leader. Westerners like her; Chinese don’t.
True or not, these were at least interesting hypotheses. But Xie also had another, more remarkable, explanation for China’s decline: the lack of food. “We were in worse physical shape than the Europeans, because we didn’t have enough to eat, and that affected our mental health. Chinese dictatorship has to do with being hungry.” What about Christianity? I asked, to get him back onto firmer ground. He replied: “I think the Chinese made one big mistake. Instead of learning the ideals from Jesus, every Chinese wants to be Jesus himself.”
This, offered without a flicker of irony in his pale, bespectacled face, made some sense. China has no tradition of monotheism. Instead, anything in nature, animal or mineral, can be imbued with a divine spirit. Emperors of China and Japan were gods of a kind. And all East Asian countries have been fertile breeding grounds for self-announced messiahs who promise to save the world if only you will buy their bibles. Xie said too many Chinese want to use religion to change society while what they ought to be doing is changing themselves first.
Xie’s conversion came in America. He had been arrested after 1989, for having encouraged the student rebellion as a “liberal” intellectual. In fact, whatever his influence might have been as one of the authors of River Elegy, Xie never offered the students direct advice. As it turned out, the government did not regard him as a great danger, either. Released after a few months, he went to Japan as a visiting scholar of comparative religion. While there, he was offered a teaching job at a Lutheran university in Minnesota but was denied a U.S. visa. He read this as a signal from God that he was not meant to become a Christian. When he was finally allowed to enter the United States in 1993, he was miserable. It was the same story as Yuan’s: His married life in China had been a disaster, but his loneliness in America was even harder to bear. He was haunted by dreams of dying alone, thousands of miles from home. But then a flash of white light: He was lifted up in the arms of Jesus. It gave him a marvelous feeling, “like floating in liquid.” The next day he told Christian friends about his dream and was told he had had a vision of the Lord. Xie was still skeptical. Two more months went by. He fell ill, his temperature soared, he thought he was going to die. In a fit of delirium, he had another vision of Jesus.
This brought him close to conversion. But he was still a deeply troubled man. For even though he now felt Jesus in his heart, he was ashamed to worship a foreigner. Jesus, after all, had been a Jew. Xie thought deeply about this predicament. Then, to his great relief, scholarship came to the rescue. His reading of the Gospels revealed that Jesus had been on earth before Abraham, so he was not really a Jew but the son of God. Only then could Xie fully accept Jesus, for Yahweh may have chosen the Jewish people, but God had chosen Christ.
But still Xie’s struggle was not quite over. When his wife called from Beijing, Xie confessed to her what he called his “greatest failure,” his conversion to the Christian faith. It was a failure, he thought, because a rational, scientific person should believe only in himself. His wife was surprised to hear the news but told him that she too had been converted, in a “house church.” Xie was not entirely convinced of the sincerity of his wife’s belief, however, for she still found it hard to believe in the resurrection and without believing in that, he said, you cannot really be called a Christian. Then there was one more thing that bothered him. He raised his doleful eyes, crossed one bony leg over the other, and then uncrossed it again. At another table, a young girl with too much makeup was shouting something in Cantonese into her cell phone. He said his trouble had to do with Tiananmen: “I feel my participation in politics, in the democracy movement, even my historical research, was a sin.”
Surprise must have shown on my face, for he quickly tried to explain what he meant. “You see, we said we acted for the good of China and not for our own selfish interests. But in fact we did it to improve our own position. We acted out of pride, for our own honor. And that is to pretend you are God. We were like Satan.”
Xie had questioned his own sincerity and found it lacking. This is why he was reaching for a belief in absolute truth—to purge insincerity from his heart. His utopia was a place where people never said anything they did not believe. Some Chinese joined the democracy movement for the same reason. But politics, in his view, was inherently insincere. Even the people in the Chinese democracy movement were just like ordinary politicians; they didn’t really believe what they said.
Xie had one person he could turn to with his doubts, a third writer on River Elegy, now also living in the United States, Su Xiaokang. Xie told me how Su had struggled with religion too. Su saw that faith had done his friend some good. It had calmed him down. But he wondered how Xie’s quest for purity affected his work. The question bothered Xie as well. Su was right, Xie said: “I haven’t been able to find a solution to this. When you write and research for a living, you have to consider the marketplace. So to continue in this line of work, you have to say things you don’t really believe.” Xie looked at me again with those eyes that expected a beating.
Before River Elegy Su Xiaokang had been a respected reporter at the People’s Daily, the official Party newspaper, and a lecturer at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute: in a way, a younger version of Liu Binyan. The film made him a star. He had written most of it. It was Su who wrote that Chinese civilization had “grown old and feeble” and that “a great tidal wave” was needed to flush away the dregs of the old tradition that clogged up the “blood vessels of our people.” I had seen film clips of him in Tiananmen Square, telling the students through a megaphone that they were patriots who should guide the Party back to its idealistic, unsullied course. A small, dark, dapper man in glasses, a bit cocky in his manner; in a Western country he would have been a typical media don.
The ambition was still there a few months after the crackdown, when he arrived in Paris as a political refugee. At the bicentennial anniversary of the French Revolution, Su founded the Overseas Federation for
a Democratic China with Wu’er Kaixi, the student leader, as vice chairman. Even though he wrote in his diary that he felt “like a tiny boat in a wide ocean, with no idea of the final destination,” Su was frantically active, giving interviews here and lectures there, traveling all over Europe, the United States, and Taiwan. This frenzy continued after he moved to the United States, where he was given shelter at Princeton University, together with other political exiles such as Liu Binyan, Chai Ling, Yuan Zhiming, and the scientist Fang Lizhi. Su entered the typical milieu of these exiles, sharing a house with ten Chinese, singing Chinese songs, drinking copious amounts of beer, and talking Chinese politics through the night, endlessly rehashing the failure of Tiananmen.
The one person who could have eased him out of this émigré hothouse was his wife, Fu Li. A physician in Beijing, she had always warned her husband about getting involved in politics. Su needed her advice now. After some hard bargaining—Beijing wanted trade advantages—the U.S. State Department managed to get her out of China in 1991, together with their nine-year-old son. Fu Li told her husband to calm down, learn English, get a job, teach, write, do anything as long as he escaped from the narrow world of political refugees. The worst thing, she said, was to be a professional revolutionary abroad. She was right, of course. But then, one sweltering afternoon in July 1993, everything came unstuck in the most terrifying manner.
Together with another Chinese couple, Su, Fu Li, and their son were heading west along Route I-90 from Buffalo, New York. Su was sleeping in the backseat of the rented Dodge, with his wife on the other side and their son in between. He was a good driver, but a long night’s drinking had left him feeling tired, so he let his friend’s wife take the wheel. She was not an experienced driver and while passing another car she switched on the windshield wipers by mistake. In a moment of panic, she lost control of the car, which careered across the road and crashed into the barrier; the vehicle flipped onto its side. Su was in a coma for a week. His son was only lightly injured. His friends were all right. But Fu Li was unconscious for three weeks and woke up in a strange country unable to remember anything—not her life in China, not Tiananmen, not her two years in the United States. All that emerged after months of silence were snatches of a nursery rhyme remembered from her childhood, which she repeated softly to herself in moments of distress.