by Ian Buruma
I would like to have spoken to Wei and shared my outrage with him about his reception in tolerant Britain. But the next day he was out trying to catch Jiang’s eye again, in Cambridge. And the day after that, he would be in Paris, and then in Spain or Tokyo or Los Angeles or . . .
Chapter 5
China in Cyberspace
The problem of exile is that it becomes increasingly hard to go home. You might eventually be able to return physically, but not to the country you left. Too much will have happened in the meantime. Those who stayed behind will have changed, but the exile, because of his peculiar experience, will have changed even more, marked by exposure to an alien world. There are cases, it is true, where exiles have gone back to be leaders. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Sun Yat-sen plotted the Chinese revolution in Tokyo, London, and Honolulu, and he returned in 1911 to lead the Chinese republic. But this is rare. Former exiles are not usually welcomed back to the fold. Like Brahmans who leave India, political rebels tend to lose their aura once they step away from the native soil. I once asked an academic in Hunan, who was critical of the Communist regime, what he thought of overseas dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng and Fang Lizhi. He replied that once a dissident leaves China, “he has no right to speak out anymore.” This was not an isolated opinion, which, by the way, is never expressed about overseas Chinese who get rich.
“All the nobodies who cannot return are going home.” This line is from a poem by Yang Lian, a writer from Beijing now living in London. He carries a New Zealand passport and lived in four different countries before arriving in England in 1993. His flat is on the third floor of a redbrick early-twentieth-century apartment block. All his neighbors are Chasidic Jews, who speak Yiddish and wear clothes reminiscent of eighteenth-century Poland. Exiles of a different kind, they regard Yang Lian and his wife You You as exotics. Yang wrote that poem in London. Those who live abroad become nobodies. Home is a land of their own invention.
Yang was once one of the “Misty Poets,” caught up in the excitement of the Democracy Wall, when young artists were discovering that there was more to art than socialist realism and more to language than Maoist jargon. They were no longer interested in “art for the masses”; official populism was tainted with too much blood and misery. Instead, they tried to pick up the fragments of traditions that they themselves, as Red Guards, had helped to destroy, to forge new forms of art that were linked to the past without being mere re-creations. Modernism suited them—T. S. Eliot was the Misty Poets’ favorite master—because they tried to reinvent “China” in a cultural and linguistic wasteland, by scraping off the grime of propaganda and creating a language that felt authentically their own.
I first met Yang in 1985, in a smart, Western-style hotel in Beijing. He looked the same then as he does now: a tall, slim figure in jeans and shoulder-length hair, the epitome of a bohemian aesthete, the antithesis of an official hack. He did not speak English yet, and my Chinese was rusty. But we understood each other. I mentioned the title of a famous Ming-dynasty pornographic novel, long forbidden in Communist China. Yang’s eyes lit up. “Very interesting!” he said. I was impressed. What I didn’t know then was that one of his own poems, celebrating, in the name of a Tibetan deity, the reawakened vitality of street people and young hoodlums, had been banned for being too obscure, too esoteric, “ideologically unhealthy,” and, of course, “pornographic.” Yang left China with his wife a few years later, before the Beijing Massacre made exile a more or less permanent condition.
Once, Yang was taken by a Scottish poet to see the ruins of a castle said to be Macbeth’s. Yang took in the green, windswept Highlands landscape and the ancient stones and observed to his host: “I’ve almost forgotten the feeling of being a poet who lives in his own country.” Yang does go back to China now and then, to see his family and travel, to sniff the familiar smells and be shocked by the changes in his native Beijing, but it no longer feels like his country. He calls it his “own foreign country.”
Like many Chinese overseas, Yang is haunted by the idea of “China.” He has often talked to me about this, in his redbrick flat in the Chasidic street in north London, sitting at his dinner table with Peking duck, served with dark, sticky hoisin sauce, like sweet tar, on our plates and Miles Davis blowing from the CD player. He is interested in politics but rejects it as a theme for his poetry, which he sees as too personal, too private to accommodate the language of public affairs. The idea of being a Chinese poet, rooted in a tradition, or seeking roots, bores him too. In an essay, entitled “Poet Without a Nation,” Yang wrote that he was not born into a “motherland” or a “tradition,” but that they are born in his poetry. Chineseness, he said32, “depends on my discovering it again and choosing it again.”
Yang Lian’s “China,” then, is a private place that exists in his own poetic Chinese language. And yet the paradox of many poets in exile is that they are lost to their readers “at home.” Presented as those of a “Chinese poet” at international poetry festivals, Yang’s words are heard most often in translation.
“In this world no-one comes from ‘China.’ I came from ‘The People’s Republic of China,’ ” Yang Lian has written. “ ‘Chinese’ has no other significance for me.” But this is not quite true. The great advantage for Chinese writers living abroad, compared to Czechs or Poles or Japanese, is that the written Chinese language transcends national borders. There is a Greater China on paper, stretching from Beijing to Vancouver. Yang Lian’s poems are published in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and sometimes even in China. He recognizes that a shared knowledge of history, literature, and even of exile from mainland China enables Taiwanese or Hong Kong Chinese to have a deeper understanding of his poetry than what can be expected of Europeans or Americans. Yang Lian’s poems are a tiny part of a culture that crosses the internal borders of Greater China. Kung-fu novels and movies, mostly produced in Hong Kong—the latter starring such diaspora heroes as Bruce Lee (born in San Francisco), who flatter ethnic myths by defeating large, villainous white men or demonic Japanese—are part of that culture. So are Cantonese pop songs and Taiwanese soap operas, and fried noodles and duck with sweet sauce. An avant-garde poet from Beijing with a New Zealand passport and a home in London may play only a peripheral, even marginal, part in that China, but as long as there is a Chinese language, that part remains. Words are his umbilical cord.
Life is more difficult for a political activist, for literature is private, and at its deepest level universal, while politics is public and resolutely local. To engage in politics, you need a political community, a nation with shared political institutions and public opinion expressed in a shared press. A dictatorship is still a political community, even though the mass media are used for propaganda and critical opinions can be voiced only underground. Exile for an activist means to be cut off from that community, no matter how many slots there are on Voice of America or Radio Free Asia. Though exiles from mainland China can publish their ideas in Hong Kong and Taiwan, they cannot do so in their homeland. To be sure, their voices had been muffled in China, too, especially if they were in jail. But their presence, even as martyrs in solitary cells, was still felt. Once abroad, many of them flounder, as lost men in search of a phantom society, fighting other lost men, hanging on desperately to the few remaining threads tying them to the world they left behind. This is why his rivals in exile accused Wei Jingsheng of being “rootless” in China. To lose your roots is to have no zige, no credentials.
And yet, perhaps, the way we define political communities is changing a bit. When we think of China as a political community, there are two Chinas, and, if we include Hong Kong, three. The millions of people outside these three places who still think of themselves as Chinese have diverse political loyalties or ignore politics altogether. Their “China” is cultural, linguistic, or sentimental: those fried noodles, ancestral memories, and kung-fu movies, but not a political community. Politics has drawn the Chinese diaspora together only under exceptional circumstance
s: the war against Japan, or the Tiananmen Movement in 1989. But the idea of nationhood has been shifted somewhat by the extraordinary nature of new information technology. “China” has been changed by the Internet.
China, as an imagined political community in which all Chinese can take part, albeit without common institutions, now exists in cyberspace—indeed, it exists only in cyberspace. The idea of electronically linking the various parts of a notional empire, like so many lights on a Christmas tree, is sentimental too, of course. The pioneers in this field were the Germans, during World War II, who hooked up field telephones and radio transmitters for special Christmas broadcasts: “Hello, here is Berlin . . . Riga . . . St. Malo . . . Kiev . . . Benghazi.” When the linkups didn’t work, they would fake it. But the significance of Cyberspace China is not just sentimental. There, for the first time, Taiwanese, mainland Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, and overseas Chinese can talk about politics every day. The Internet has become a forum of worldwide Chinese opinion, posted on websites, transmitted by e-mail, debated in chat rooms. Geographical borders no longer count in the same way they did. Even minor barriers to smooth communication, such as the different ways of writing Chinese characters in mainland China and other parts of the Chinese-speaking world, can be overcome with a simple change of font.
Cyberspace China is also where religion gets a boost from science. New, Buddhist-inspired religions have always spanned the various parts of Greater China; now they can spread instantly through the Internet. Most recently, Falun Gong has spooked the Communist government sufficiently to become an international cause célèbre. What began as a loosely organized group of people in northeast China expanded into an international organization with millions of followers all over the world. Without the World Wide Web and e-mail, it would never have happened. And no matter how many adherents are arrested, tortured, and killed in China, the movement stays alive, both in the streets, where believers continue to volunteer for martyrdom, and in cyberspace.
Surfing the Chinese websites, many of them set up in North America, is a bit like delving into the conscious, rational mind of a nation as well as the dark unconscious, filled with delusions and paranoia, sexual fantasies, religious longing, and smoldering resentments. The Internet lacks a superego that filters the monsters arising from the lower depths. It is where the wildest conspiracy theories are aired. It is also where people are denounced as spies, whores, gangsters, Communist agents, ass-licking dogs of the American imperialists, and much, much worse. Feuds between different factions of the overseas Chinese democracy movement go on and on, often expressed in terms more commonly used on the walls of public lavatories. One search for the names Wei Jingsheng or Wang Xizhe will reveal file upon file about their hostile encounters, posted by acolytes, enemies and hangers-on, from Boston, Hong Kong, or Shanghai. The Internet has the effect of making the private public; malicious gossip is instantly shared by millions. But since much of this is posted on the Net anonymously or under false names—and some of it planted by government agencies—you never really know who is saying what, and why. Entering some websites is therefore a surreal experience, like visiting a mental institution with thousands of insanely chattering voices.
On the question of Taiwan, for example, there is at one level a great deal of interesting debate on the Internet about the meaning of popular sovereignty, the relative importance of history and culture on political affairs, and the nature of the Communist Party compared to the KMT. Opinions tend to reflect the origins of those who express them—that is, native Taiwanese, whether they are living in Taiwan, the U.S., or elsewhere, promote Taiwanese independence more than do those with a background in mainland China. But not always. Wei Jingsheng has stated that Taiwanese sovereignty should be a matter of popular choice. He doesn’t advocate independence, indeed he warns against it, but if most Taiwanese choose independence, it should be up to them to decide.
However, if you were to read other opinions posted on bulletin boards to encourage debate, you would plunge straight into the soil where more primitive weeds flourish. I found the following argument on Taiwanese independence expressed in broken English on a website called Free Talk: “Fuck UR mother. I fucked 17 mainland whores.” Whereupon another debater on the same issue responded: “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck UR Taiwanese mother. Taiwan is China province.” The peculiar nature of the insults clearly reveal the writers to be Chinese, though in this case they are expressed in English, the lingua franca of habitual Internet surfers. Similar insults are also posted in Chinese, sometimes by official sources. The crudest language is said to come from Public Security agents in Beijing.
It is not always easy to combat Internet abuse without resorting to the kind of censorship that Chinese dissidents are trying so hard to resist. On the tenth anniversary of Tiananmen, Wang Dan, the former student leader, now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led a signature campaign through the Internet to press Beijing to revise its verdict on the events of 1989. His website was quickly filled with obscene messages and insults, some perhaps sent from sources connected to the Public Security Bureau. But out of deference to the principles of free speech, Wang was reluctant at first to object. Nonetheless, like hecklers at a meeting, this cyberspace graffiti became such a menace that a warning had to be issued. Profanities and incitements to violence and hatred would no longer be tolerated: “We have a responsibility to remove your posting, if you do not follow these simple rules, and we will.”
Politics are local. Few Taiwanese Internet surfers are interested in the feuds among political refugees from mainland China, while the internal politics of Taiwan or Hong Kong are of interest mostly to people living there. But certain symbols and historical events speak to the heart of all “descendants of the dragon”: tragic defeats, heroic rebellions, and permanent enemies. Two events stand out in Cyberspace China: the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, when Japanese troops killed and raped many thousands of unarmed citizens, and the Beijing Massacre of 1989. The first turns shared feelings of outrage outward, against Japan, for its “refusal” to apologize, compensate, and atone for its war crimes; the other focuses on the crimes of the Chinese government itself, but also on hopes for a freer, more dignified, more open China, in which all Chinese can take pride.
Rage against foreign aggression and homegrown tyranny are linked, by patriots quick to criticize their government for not “loving China” enough. The language used in both cases, by writers from all parts of Cyberspace China, is similar. Phrases like “wipe out the shame” and “blood for blood” crop up frequently. And readers are sometimes addressed as “brothers and sisters,” as though all Chinese were family. At least one website is called the Family of the Chinese People (Huaren Yijia). It is certainly the case that when Japanese do anything to stir up Chinese emotions—a conservative politician justifying the war, or right-wing zealots occupying a tiny disputed island in the South China Sea—the Internet starts to hum with Chinese voices that can agree at least on the point of Japan’s eternal iniquity. The same patriotic solidarity was expressed in 1989, when Chinese everywhere sent money to the students in Beijing, linked to the world through a fax machine. The Internet should be an even more effective tool for organizing a worldwide Chinese community.
The Internet has created a new species of dissident, too. In the 1990s, bands of cyberspace guerrillas, or hacktivists, with names like the Cult of the Dead Cow—so named because its founders used to hang out in an abattoir—hacked into official Chinese government websites sabotaging their operations. The so-called foreign minister of the Cult of the Dead Cow is a former Chinese U.N. consultant who goes by the Internet name of Oxblood Ruffin. The leader of the gang is called Blondie Wong; he is an astrophysicist who recalls seeing his father being stoned to death by Red Guards. It was the sight on American TV of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square that prodded Ruffin into action.
Li Hongkuan, or Richard Li, or Richard Long (aliases proliferate on the Net) lives in Washington, D.C. Li is not a hacker, but his activiti
es in a one-room office stacked with laptops and CD-ROMs have been more influential than the exploits of the Internet guerrillas with rock group names.
We would meet, during the winter and spring of 1999, at a coffee shop near Dupont Circle. A vibrant, round-faced figure in his late thirties, who could pass as a sharp financial trader, Li decided in 1997 to edit a website called VIP Reference News, or Dacankao. The name is a witty borrowing of the official term for uncensored “internal” information, often foreign news, circulated only among Party cadres: Real news is privileged; the common people have to make do with propaganda. Li decided to change that by making the news available to all. He provided a daily newsletter excerpting many of the papers and magazines published in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as well as Chinese dissident journals abroad, and, of course, information about Tiananmen and the Nanjing Massacre. There were links to bulletin boards, which function like an electronic Democracy Wall, plastered with e-mails instead of wall posters. And all this was financed by Li’s own savings, accumulated by a stint on Wall Street.
Li’s first political act was to join a pro-democracy demonstration in Shanghai in 1987. As a graduate student in biochemistry, he was inspired by a speech given by Fang Lizhi at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. But worship of science cannot have been his only motivation. For this was the same Richard Li who told me that Chinese hate one another because they lack a religion that teaches them to love. The Chinese, he said, did not know the difference between right and wrong. Everything in Chinese life depended on connections. If someone knew you, you would be treated well. But they hated you if you were a stranger. And that, he concluded, is why Chinese might be in need of Christianity, to learn to love without condition.