Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  That night Dai called me at my hotel. Would I like to meet Bao Tong? But if I did, she warned, I would have to be prepared for trouble with the authorities; I might not get a visa again. I said that would be a risk worth taking. Good, she said, and told me to be at a certain subway station at seven o’clock the next morning. He would be there to take his grandchild to school. She would give him a copy of his book of essays, banned in China and just published in Hong Kong, and then we would board the same train.

  It was a typical Beijing spring day. The sky was a deep blue, before the sandstorms began to blow from the Gobi Desert to turn the sky yellow. I waited at the entrance of the subway station opposite the bright new McDonald’s, from which the sound of Muzak filled the crisp morning air. There was a constant flow of people on the subway stairs. I saw one or two shifty-looking men, but then, on these occasions, everyone begins to look sinister. I tried to be inconspicuous, a difficult task when you are the only white person standing still in a crowd of Chinese. There was a man leading a small child quickly through the turnstiles. I did not have a chance to look at them carefully. They were in too much of a hurry. It may not have been them. The appointed time came and passed. I left after an hour.

  Around lunchtime the phone in my hotel room rang. It was Dai Qing, cackling as usual. The police had swooped down on her the moment she stepped out of her apartment building. They told her they knew exactly where she was going, pushed her into an unmarked car, and sped to the police station, where they lectured her for four hours on the need for stability and order and civil obedience.

  Perhaps I had glimpsed Bao Tong after all, rushing through the turnstiles; he didn’t know he was meeting a foreigner: Dai Qing, wisely, had not told him that. But I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. And in any event, it was too late.

  I often wondered why many Chinese intellectuals were so skeptical about the possibility of democracy in China and why China’s intellectual class had produced more Dubceks than Havels. History must have something to do with it. Czechs and Poles had a model to fall back on. Their countries had experienced democracy before being swallowed by the Soviet empire. China, instead, has a history of violent rebellions. And during periods of calm, rulers buy potential dissidents off by offering rich rewards for their collaboration. Perhaps the Taiwanese broke the mold, because ethnic tensions prevented most dissidents from being co-opted by the KMT. Then there is the brutal fact that most Chinese democrats are either broken in jail or pushed abroad to languish in dreary exile. But in truth there are not so many Chinese Václav Havels in exile, either.

  Fear is another factor, fear of violence and disorder, fear of public hysteria, or what Li Lu, talking about his experience as a student on Tiananmen Square, called “raw emotions”: fear of the uneducated, common people, who are prone to run amok. Given the history of violent rebellion in China, this fear is understandable. It is why Dai Qing, and others, talk about the slow process of “educating the people,” of learning the art of compromise.

  Again, one sees what she means, but the analysis is flawed. For the people responsible for persecuting intellectuals, from the early days of the Communist movement in the caves of Yan’an all the way to the present time, are not uneducated peasants or ignorant workers but Party leaders, often assisted in their inquisitorial work by fellow intellectuals. And political liberties are unlikely to result in people running amok. On the contrary, the raw emotions, the latent hysteria, the pent-up aggressions seething under the surface of Chinese life are the result of living in a lie. As long as people cannot speak freely, nothing can be exposed to the light of reason, and raw emotions will take over. But to acquire the right to free speech, there will have to be a change of system, and it is hard to see how that can happen unless the Communist Party is forced out of power. What makes the future so hard to read is that the raw emotions are as much of a help to the government as a threat. Sometimes these emotional storms change direction, as when students protesting foreign imperialism suddenly turn on their own government.

  Two months after the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, when anti-Western sentiments were still fresh, I went to see a play at a theater in Beijing, Fields of Life and Death. The story, written in 1935 by a famous novelist and poet, Xiao Hong, is set in a village in the northeast of China. The poor villagers are oppressed on all sides, by their landlord and by the Japanese army, which comes rampaging through on a spree of rape and murder. Used to adapting to the violence of new masters, the villagers don’t resist at first but hope that the storm will blow over, as they always do, until the next time, and the next. They have little idea of the world outside the village. They barely have an idea of “China,” or of what it means to be Chinese. Nor do they much care. But then, toward the end of the play, one bright young villager goes off to join the anti-Japanese war. And when he returns, full of fire, he makes a great patriotic speech, telling the villagers to rise up for China, avenge past humiliations, and resist the foreign invaders. Patriotism has reached village China at last.

  Xiao Hong was quite a complicated writer, a leftist with sardonic views of both village life and Chinese patriotism. She even dared to make fun of the anti-Japanese war. And her play was directed as much against the Chinese government as it was against the Japanese. She died in Hong Kong under Japanese occupation, at thirty-one.

  None of this complexity came out in the production I saw, which had all the lurid imagery of a Communist propaganda poster: the landlords and Japanese were cartoons of evil, the people blazed with righteous patriotic virtue, and in defeat, the wicked fascists cringed, like worms, while the victors, bathing in the blue spotlights, struck the heroic poses of revolutionary monuments. It might have been one of Jiang Qing’s model revolutionary operas of the 1960s.

  But the production didn’t surprise me so much as the reaction of the mostly young audience. During the slow, creaky scenes, there was a great deal of shifting in seats, chattering, and trips to and from the toilets. But as the climax built, I could feel the tension rise, until in the final scene, when the villagers decide to fight, crying, “We are the Chinese people! We are the Chinese people! The Chinese people are united against the foreign enemy!” the audience rose too, shouting and hooting and clapping. It was like the high point in a revivalist church, a religious crescendo, a kind of orgasmic release.

  At first I thought there was irony intended here, a sly dig at the government’s attempt to stir up patriotic fervor in the aftermath of the Belgrade bombing. But my companion, a professor of Chinese history, soon disabused me. “No, no,” he said. “We all feel like this in our hearts.”

  Walking out of the theater into the throng of shoppers on Wangfujing, with its fashion boutiques, department stores, and the largest McDonald’s in China, Professor Mao Haijian told me about the legacy in China of social Darwinism—the idea, that is, of a struggle for survival among nations. A small, neatly dressed academic, with a pink nose and a diffident manner, he spoke softly and picked his words with fastidious precision: “All Chinese intellectuals, including myself, are social Darwinists. We are all sensitive to Western superiority, and boast about the Chinese race because in our hearts we feel inferior. We realize this is irrational, dangerous, even wrong, but still we feel it.”

  I was fascinated to hear this from Professor Mao, for he was a man who had chosen, to some degree and at a personal cost, at least in his professional career, to live in the truth. Mao had challenged one of the most cherished national myths by writing a version of the Opium War that diverged sharply from the official history. What is more, he based many of his conclusions on his careful reading of Western sources. In the professor’s version, the Qing officials who argued for a compromise with the British, and who were subsequently denounced in Chinese history books as traitors, were right, and the patriotic martyrs, whose monuments I had visited in southern China, the men who wanted to fight the Western imperialists to the death, were deluded. China should have done
what Japan did in the 1850s, when the Americans arrived in their “black ships”: surrender to the barbarians and learn from them to strengthen the nation15. His book was published, but his career at the Academy of Social Sciences did not flourish.

  Professor Mao was not a political activist. In fact, he abhors zeal of any kind. Wei Jingsheng, he explained, got into trouble because he didn’t understand what was possible in China. It wasn’t that Wei’s views were wrong. Indeed, most people knew they were right. But there was no point in stating those views, because that just led to confrontation. The smartest intellectuals in China, Mao said, knew the truth but remained silent.

  Surely, I said, with all the easy conviction of an outsider, that cannot be right. Without open debate, there can’t be any advance in knowledge. How can we find the truth without discussing it? He looked at me calmly. Nothing I said was new or especially surprising to him. They were, after all, commonplaces repeated in hundreds of articles published in Chinese intellectual journals or on Internet websites. To state the obvious in the abstract is simple. “Well,” he said, politely putting me in my place, “that is the difference between China and the West. It is not a good thing, but it is the way it is.”

  I asked him whether he feared the Chinese masses. Again he spoke with a kind of verbal shrug of resignation. Yes, he said. “There is a fear that the uneducated people will violently resist the right of others to speak out. The rule of the majority would be a tyranny. It took Europeans many years to realize that minorities had rights, too. In China it would be every man for himself. I am a historian. Never in history have sudden transitions been a good thing.”

  That is what most intellectuals in China believe, and perhaps they speak from superior wisdom, as well as fear. Mob violence, so quick to surface in China, is a fearful thing, and many intellectuals over fifty were the victims as well as perpetrators, depending on the time and place. Their present-day moderation may be one way of doing penance, of dealing with the guilt, as well as the terror, that few express but some at least must feel. But this does not mean that their analysis is right. Political liberties may come slowly, in an orderly process, initiated by liberal-minded leaders in the Party, but it is unlikely. Dictatorships fall in many ways, often sparked by unexpected events, which serve as catalysts for protest and resistance. Dictators, having been so sure of their power before, can suddenly lose their nerve, and their subjects, so used to being cowed and passive, can suddenly lose their fears. It happened in Bucharest in 1989. It almost happened in Beijing. It could happen again. But one ingredient that is essential in any struggle for freedom was missing in Tiananmen Square: All those who oppose the dictatorship, whether reformers, liberals, radicals, religious believers, activists, philosophers, leftists, or conservatives, must make common cause. For if they do not, the regime will exploit their differences, and stay in power. In China, however, intellectuals are so frightened of disorder that they are prone to shun the common cause, and opt instead for stability.

  Again, one understands why. But it is a phantom stability; there are great cracks showing in the Communist order, and the longer this system continues, with its increasingly desperate attempts to hide the truth of its moral and political bankruptcy, the greater the chaos is likely to be when Chinese explode once more in an orgy of raw emotion. It is happening already, in small towns, where farmers vent their rage at arbitrary taxes by destroying public buildings. It is happening in the rust-belt cities of the northeast, where thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps millions, suddenly find themselves jobless when factories close and the loot is divided among the Party nomenklatura.

  Nationalism will be the only thing the Chinese rulers have left to deflect rebellious energy from themselves onto the outside world. But to deflect these energies outward, against Taiwan, say, or the United States, they would have to tap the same well of resentment and humiliation that nurtured rebellions in the past. It would take a brave, or desperate, government to arouse these passions.

  Dai Qing and others are right to fear another round of mass violence. For an outsider to dismiss their fear and advocate revolution is irresponsible; the Western observer, or indeed the Chinese exile, does not have to face the consequences of such advocacy. I am aware of this, yet cannot shake off my doubts about the way many reformists discuss change. Is the emphasis on ethics, on moral education of the common people, really the best way to break the infernal cycle of tyranny and violent rebellion? Or is it the same kind of thinking which keeps that cycle in motion? Moral reformists, Confucianists, Chinese Communists, and religious zealots seem to share the assumption that good government depends more on human virtue than on democratic institutions. Wei Jingsheng may be lacking in many virtues, but I believe his Fifth Modernization, pinned to the Democracy Wall in 1979, still contains a profound truth: “Anyone seeking the unconditional trust of the people is a person of unbridled ambition. . . . We can trust only those representatives who are supervised by us and responsible to us. Such representatives should be chosen by us and not thrust upon us.”

  Whether one thinks this applies to China as much as anywhere else really depends on whether one believes that democratic institutions can work in a country that has had no history—or, if you prefer, culture—of democracy. The examples of Taiwan and South Korea, Japan, Thailand, India, or indeed any other democratic country in the world would seem to show that democracy is relatively indifferent to culture. It functions better in some places than others, for all kinds of reasons, but it can be attempted anywhere with some chance of success. Culture is too often used by rulers as an excuse for perpetuating their monopoly on power. That is what the “Asian values” propaganda in Singapore is all about. But Chinese culture is not some monolithic barrier to building democratic institutions. This also means that, contrary to the beliefs of the more fanatical “westernizers” of May 4, 1919, or indeed their Communist heirs, there is no need to smash everything old to change the form of government. Chinese do not have to become Americans or Europeans to be free.

  Wei Jingsheng is not naÏve about the costs of a transition from a one-party dictatorship to a democratic system. He has told me many times that it will be a messy, probably violent process. But he is convinced, and I fear he may be right, that the longer that process is delayed, the greater the violence will be.

  This is the Chinese dilemma. To force a sudden transition by bringing the government down after a rebellion, which could be sparked by any number of things—religious zeal, intolerable corruption, or mass unemployment—could result in a period of frightful chaos. But the risk of hanging on to a bankrupt system in the hope of prolonging an illusion of stability could be worse. Conservatives like Dai Qing and Professor Mao argue, as David Hume did two hundred years ago, that history should be our guide and that a bad established order is still better than unpredictable change. Christians zealots like Yuan Zhiming, who wrote parts of the television series River Elegy, are convinced that a spiritual transformation is necessary before a democracy can take hold. Then there are those for whom, in the May Fourth spirit, Mr. Science holds the key to solving all our human problems.

  But democracy is not the result of spiritual transformations, moral crusades, or blind faith in science. For unlike in the ancient Chinese system of government, or in its Communist incarnation, the center of power in a democracy cannot be the center of truth. To try and replace one center of truth with another is not the way to freedom. This is the cycle that has to end. Dai Qing’s advocacy of critical argument and compromise is just a beginning. Political argument must be institutionalized, not behind the closed doors of one party or among a tiny intellectual elite, but in various parties contending for people’s support through the powers of persuasion. As long as only one party rules, talk of the “rule of law” or of carefully controlled village elections or of conferences about “social democracy” is just window dressing to confer an air of respectability upon a desperate regime.

  Traveling in China, one easily picks up the ra
nk smell of political decay. I left Beijing more convinced than ever that Communist Party rule would end, but without any better sense of how this might happen. The peaceful revolutions in Taiwan, South Korea, and Eastern Europe give no firm clues. Circumstances are not the same. I do not share the optimism of those who cling to the hope that the Chinese, in their infinite subtlety, will find a slow, gentle road to the Fifth Modernization, shepherded by the Communist Party. The KMT did it in Taiwan, but the Chinese Communist Party is not the KMT. Whatever it is that brings this rotting regime to an end, one can only hope it will be peaceful. But hope is not the same as expectation. The Chinese verb qidai can mean both “to expect” and “to look forward to.” It was the word used by Chai Ling when she gave that rambling interview to an American reporter days before the massacre of June 4. It is at the heart of the Rashomon story of Tiananmen. Did she mean to say she looked forward to the bloodshed that would at last unite the Chinese people in opposition? Or did she simply expect it? To hope for such a thing would be a terrible thing. But she was not wrong to expect it, not then and not in the future—not until that old cycle of Chinese tyranny and violence is broken.

  Before leaving Beijing in the spring of 2000, I decided to have one more look at Tiananmen Square, so I rented a bicycle and set off together with an Italian friend. We had been advised against cycling that day, for the sand was expected to blow fiercely from the Gobi Desert. I had read an article in the China Daily that warned that the desert was creeping several meters closer to Beijing every year.

  We stopped to take some pictures in front of Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where Chairman Mao declared in 1949, in his oddly high-pitched Hunanese voice, that the Chinese people had risen. His face still gazes permanently across the Square, like a rosy moon over the Forbidden City. In 1989, at the height of the student demonstrations, three young workers from Mao’s province of Hunan flung a pot of black paint in the Chairman’s face. The students, afraid that the raw emotions of the people might get out of control, dutifully handed the three men over to the police. They were in prison for years. One is supposed to have gone mad.