by Ian Buruma
Grace was staying with her aunt. From the great height of her aunt’s apartment, on the twenty-fifth floor, the urban chaos of Guangzhou looked like a cheap mishmash of Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore, a jumbled conglomeration of highways, overpasses, high-rise office buildings, apartment blocks, shops, discotheques, and hotels, all built at great speed and with minimum taste. Guangzhou lacks the style of Tokyo or even Taipei and has none of the cosmopolitanism of Shenzhen. And apart from the odd colonial-style villa or tarted-up Buddhist temple, there was not much evidence of the city’s rich history.
It was hot and only just past lunchtime. We drank iced Coca-Cola from tall green glasses. Grace’s aunt was married to a successful businessman, one of the beneficiaries of the Open Door. So she no longer needed to work. Dressed in a frilly purple satin housedress, she padded around the apartment, which was furnished with a shiny brown sofa, covered in plastic, facing a gigantic black television with a video player. A crystal waterfall cascaded from the ceiling, and the mantelpiece was adorned by a large gold clock, which every so often broke into a tune.
I was rather relieved when Grace suggested a visit to a Buddhist temple. In the taxi, she told me of her plans. She wanted to help build a “civil society” in China and restore Chinese “spiritual values.” This time she spoke of “we Chinese.”
Civil society?
Yes, Grace said, for China was lacking in spiritual values. What was badly needed was religion, to hold the country together in preparation for democracy, which was the ultimate aim. But you couldn’t have democracy overnight. That would plunge the country into chaos. The first thing was to revive religious faith.
Grace herself was a Buddhist. Not, she said, that she was like those “granola kids,” looking for their roots in the exotic East. She despised them. No, with her it was something deeper, more a matter of common ancestral feeling. We arrived at the temple, a crude concrete building plus pagoda, elaborately decorated in the Qing-dynasty style. The site was old, but the temple had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and then rebuilt in the 1980s. Grace asked me whether I would like to burn some incense, to “share” the experience, as it were, though this was not an expression she would have used; that was more for the granola kids. She got on her knees before a coarsely made, brightly shining golden Buddha and folded her hands in prayer.
I asked her why she thought a religious revival was so important for China’s democratic prospects. Well, she said, “we Chinese share common values. Buddhism is deeply ingrained in us.”
Talk of common values shared by an entire race always makes me edgy. I said something dismissive, which put Grace on the defensive. We were racing along in a taxi from the Buddhist temple to the Academy of Social Sciences, where I had made an appointment with Chen Yiyang, co-author with Wang Xizhe and others of the 1974 Li Yi Zhe manifesto, with which the pro-democracy movement in China began. He was also the former boyfriend of my friend in Washington D.C., Gong Xiaoxia, who had joined his group of activist friends in the 1970s. Grace repeated her assertion, raising her voice a fraction: “We Chinese have a common feeling about China, you know, like, we love China and want to make China strong again.”
Chen Yiyang came out to meet us at the elevator on the top floor of the academy building. He was in charge of the classical Chinese library. There was nobody else around, only Chen, a slim man in sandals, with long, thin hands and the fine, bony face of a monk. He looked older than his fifty-odd years. It was hard to imagine that this scholarly figure had once led tens of thousands of Red Guards in ferocious street battles. He placed two cups of hot water—what Chinese call white tea—on a long wooden table and poured none for himself.
Chen was on his own in the library, he explained, because no one was interested in classical Chinese literature anymore. Hardly anybody came up to his floor these days, not even to destroy the old books. Young people found it hard to read anything published before 1949, let alone 1900. The characters were too complicated, the style too abstruse. It suited him fine, Chen said, to be on his own. I looked at the dusty stacks of hand-stitched classical tomes, mostly from the nineteenth century, some older. It suited him, he said, because it gave him time to think.
Chen was one of the pioneers of the dissident movement in Communist China, but his radicalism had long ago faded into resignation. Perhaps he never had the temperament of the absolute believer, dedicated totally to a cause. Like Wang Xizhe, Chen had done hard labor in the countryside, and I knew from Gong Xiaoxia that he had suffered terribly from his two years in jail as a “counterrevolutionary” in the late 1970s. But he was not made to be a martyr. And now he seemed to have pulled back from the world, away from danger. Questions about his past met with short answers and an embarrassed smile.
The nature of his embarrassment was not easy to fathom. Was it guilt about the violence in which he had been caught up, and had perhaps instigated, in the 1960s? Guilt for having beaten up innocent people? His teachers, or perhaps even his parents? Remorse is not something I had often found among former Red Guards. Su Xiaokang, the writer of River Elegy who now lives in Princeton, was an exception. “We all feel deep guilt,” he had said. “All of us who went through the Cultural Revolution feel guilty.” If Chen felt the same, he never said so. I don’t think Chinese culture offers much of a clue for this common reticence. It is more likely that suffering often cancels out feelings of personal guilt. Almost no one who lived under Mao was entirely a victim or a perpetrator. Most people were both. This is part of the wickedness of Maoism: Almost every urban Chinese was an accomplice at one time or another.
On later occasions, in the same library, Chen told me about his mother, who had been very ill while he was in jail. She was literally worried sick. He had not wanted to give her more grief. In his fine handwriting, Chen wrote down four Chinese characters on a piece of paper: “Live in peace, work in joy.” That is what most Chinese want, he said: Everyone is terrified of more upheavals. So he lived a quiet life now, with his wife, child, and mother. “A small paradise” was the phrase he used, and his gaunt face creased in a look that was both rueful and, apparently, contented.
Chen was no longer actively concerned with contemporary politics. A few years ago he had tried to write something about the importance of civil liberties but couldn’t get it published. Democracy would in any case be a slow process. It was no good just believing in slogans, “as we used to do.” First people had to learn to think freely. Chen showed us two books he had written, one on Buddhism and one on Taoism. “Religion is very important,” he said. Although he himself was not a believer, he often visited temples and shrines, for “Chinese forms and traditions must be preserved.”
I could see Grace’s face light up when she heard this. She was nodding vigorously, perhaps a bit for my benefit, too. But Chen’s interest in religion was not the same as hers. His was less emotional and more intellectual. Whereas Grace had spoken about the need to “bond” as a people, through “shared values,” Chen criticized the Chinese for their lack of self-scrutiny. Too much in China, he believed, goes unexamined. “People talk about the Chinese as though they were one people,” he said, “but the very idea of China goes unexamined. After all, what is China? Taiwan, Hong Kong, the People’s Republic? The great weakness of Chinese civilization is the lack of analysis, of logical criticism.” Grace had stopped nodding and wore a puzzled frown.
What, I asked, did the lack of analysis have to do with religion?
His answer should not have surprised me, for I had heard it before, from Li Lu, the former student leader, and Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist, among others. Like them, Chen believed that Christianity had laid the foundation for Western inquiry and science. Belief in a universal God had raised philosophical questions about the nature of the universe, whereas to the Chinese, faith had always been a pragmatic affair, a set of rules to gain power and wealth. That is why Europe had science while China had only “technique.” Europeans explored the truth, whereas Chinese had
learning and dogmas. They were not interested in the truth.
Each time I met Chen on subsequent occasions, surrounded by his Qing-dynasty books, we argued about this rose-tinted take on Christianity and Western civilization. What about the Greek tradition? Wasn’t logical analysis far more rooted in that? And wasn’t the Christian religion responsible for a great deal of obscurantism and intolerance? Well yes, of course, there was that too, but the belief in God . . . And so it went, neither of us able to convince the other.
In their different ways, both Grace Liu and Chen Yiyang were emigrants of a kind. Grace had literally emigrated with her family. Having left, she had developed a romantic view of “China.” Kneeling to the golden Buddha was her way of sharing ancestral feelings. Later that summer, she visited other Buddhist temples in the hope of rekindling more of those feelings. Tibet was to be the final destination. But she gave up halfway. The hotels were too shabby and the toilets too dirty. In the chaos of the real China, her feeling of “we Americans” gained the upper hand over “we Chinese.” Yet she romanticized “we Americans,” too, and complicated matters with a third “we”: “we conservatives.” Like others of her generation, Grace had rebelled against her professors, who had come of age in the 1960s. She hated “political correctness.”
“We conservatives” had different “shared values,” such as “order, stability, religion, and a certain suspicion of democracy.” She tried to explain all this in a famous restaurant that specialized in dog stew. People at other tables shouted, red-faced, over their steaming hotpots and looked happy in the heat and the noise. “Foreigners,” Grace said, were “irritating.” I wasn’t immediately sure whom she meant. But then: People who don’t speak English with an American accent were “annoying.” Grace was happy when she saw an American flag.
This was partly her way of getting a rise out of me, a European who grew up in the 1960s. I decided to challenge her nonetheless. What exactly was that “bond” of which she spoke, the one “shared” by “us Americans”?
She hesitated, reaching for the right words: “Ah, greatness, uniqueness . . .”
Unique in what respect?
Again, hesitation. “Freedom, openness to immigrants, um . . .”
Grace combined the ethnic patriotism of Chinese propaganda with the conservative American patriotism of the first-generation immigrant. Groping for community, she had tried to reconstruct the collectivism of her early childhood in China in the now more familiar surroundings of the New World. Bonding was important to her. She could take personal freedom for granted, but not national belonging.
Chen’s emigration was of a very different kind, more akin to what German intellectuals in the Third Reich called “inner emigration.” He escaped from China by withdrawing into himself. His preoccupation with spirituality and the distant past was a refuge, “a small paradise.” There is a great deal of inner—as well as outer—emigration in China. There always was. The mountain hermit, the sage in his rustic teahouse, the retired scholar, these are all familiar images in Chinese art and poetry. Inner emigration is the traditional way out. It is why some former activists turn to religion, in the way others turn to sex—a quest for individual freedom, as well as a sign of quiet desperation.
One month after my first meeting with Chen Yiyang, the issue of religion exploded all over China. On April 25, 1999, ten thousand members of the religious group named Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, suddenly appeared in front of Zhongnanhai. Most of them were middle-aged or elderly; they insisted on their right to carry out their religious practices in public. Like all believers, they did not like being criticized. So when they were attacked by a professor in a small literary magazine, there had been a noisy demonstration denouncing the critic. Some members were arrested. And that is why they had come to protest the arrests, by train, by bus, sometimes even on foot. They gathered silently in the center of Beijing, sat down in disciplined rows, meditated for a whole day, and left in the same ghostly manner in which they had come.
Falun Gong was just one of many Chinese cults, based on a mixture of Buddhism, Taoism, and various folk beliefs. Like the others, it promised good health, enlightenment, spiritual salvation, and release from wordly desires through meditation, breathing exercises, and a particular guru’s wisdom. But no other sect had shown such organization or claimed a membership of 100 million people: more than the Chinese Communist Party itself. The police had had no idea. The government leaders were shocked. So on July 22 the group was banned as an “evil cult” that “corrupted people’s minds” and “sabotaged national stability.” Falun Gong was considered the biggest threat to Chinese society since the student rebellion in 1989.
Within seventy-two hours, twenty-six thousand people were arrested. Ten thousand more were jailed in the next four months. Official denunciations—on television and radio, in newspapers, magazines, and public meetings—went on relentlessly. The curious charge of “disseminating state secrets” was added to the others. More than twenty believers were said to have died of ill-treatment in jail, a number that was to grow to more than a hundred. Many members were not always in the best of health. One woman choked to death when a food tube, shoved down her throat, punctured her lung. Others jumped out of detention-center windows. And yet despite all this (or perhaps because of it), many believers kept turning up in Tiananmen Square, sometimes several hundred a week, always quietly, to be promptly taken off by policemen on the lookout for meditators. Many claimed to be ready to die for their faith. Most gave themselves up.
Then, one wintry day in 2001, the drama escalated: Seven people set themselves on fire by drinking gasoline from Sprite bottles. One was a girl of twelve, who was told that fire could not hurt her. The police arrived with fire extinguishers. One of the believers cried: “Let me go to heaven!” The girl survived. Her mother died in the flames.
It has happened many times in Chinese history, when the rulers, corrupted by too many years in power, are in danger of losing their grip. Peasant messiahs appear, millenarian cults form, and, crazed by illusions of immortality, masses of people embark on violent rebellions. In the second century A.D. the Yellow Turbans staged a revolt that helped to bring the government down. After the Opium Wars, in the mid-nineteenth century, Hong Xiuquan, the man who claimed to be Christ’s younger brother, named his sect Taiping, Great Peace, in homage to the Yellow Turbans. His rebellion cost millions of lives but hastened the downfall of the Qing dynasty. Barely fifty years later, the Boxers revolted.
History and its uses are always a complicated business. The Boxers are officially regarded by the Communists as “anti-imperialist” heroes. And the Taiping rebellion, too, is often described as an anti-imperialist revolt, even though some of the imperialists initially helped their supposedly fellow Christians and the revolt was aimed mainly at the Qing court. The Communist government, at any rate, was surely conscious of history when it decided to crack down on Falun Gong. There was about the cult the usual air of fraudulence and internal politicking, to be sure, with disgruntled gurus fighting each other for the spoils of others’ gullibility. There were fights on the Internet between the founder, a former martial arts master named Li Hongzhi, and a woman from the south named Belinda Peng Shanshan, who claimed that she was the true leader. But there could be no doubt that Falun Gong was an organized challenge to the Communist Party’s right to rule. Once again self-appointed men of superior virtue had come to save China from godlessness and corruption.
But there was no sign that this particular sect was about to erupt in violent rebellion. On the contrary, most Falun Gong believers saw their faith as a private affair, a form of inner emigration. Falun Gong is in fact an offshoot of a faith-healing technique, based on breathing exercises, called Qigong, which became wildly popular, not least among Communist Party cadres, in the 1980s. Many claims were made for it: Cancer patients who gathered in a public park in Beijing to practice Qigong thought it would cure their illness (proof is yet to be conclusive). In 1992, Li Hongzhi, a
young Qigong enthusiast from the industrial northeast of China, decided to found his own school. His tract, entitled Zhuan Falun, a mixture of science and religion, promised to lift those who “cultivate” themselves in Falun Gong to a higher moral and spiritual plane, as well as cure them of ill health. The contents range from the zany to the banal. “Master Li” preaches the virtues of compassion, forbearance, and truth. Alcohol and drugs are banned. And cultivators are told to withdraw from politics and other worldly affairs so they can elevate themselves from base human nature toward “higher dimensions.”
Master Li, who left the grime of China’s northeast for a reclusive existence in New Jersey, doesn’t seem remarkable. You might mistake him for a pharmacist or an accountant. But his public relations skills are impressive, and much boosted by modern technology. He changed his birthdate to that of the Buddha, something he claims is a coincidence, but every little thing helps. Videos of the Master levitating in yellow silk robes and accompanied by mystical New Age music added to his appeal. The Internet spreads Li’s message not just in China but all over the world, and it was the main reason ten thousand people could be mobilized to demonstrate in Beijing.
I should have known that bigger trouble was brewing. Later in 1999, in the summer, I was introduced to a follower of Falun Gong in Beijing, a university professor whom I shall call Wang. We met at a bar named Frank’s Place. Bored waitresses in miniskirts listened impassively to an Eric Clapton tape. Wang, a tall, lanky man in his forties, dressed in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, laughed a great deal, and not always in the appropriate places, which gave the impression of nervousness rather than mirth. Though he was a scientist by profession, Wang was interested in history, especially Chinese history of the nineteenth century.