Li Hua Wang lives in a small apartment building on the Provincial Road Northeast of the City of Beijing, China, beyond the International Airport and the 6th Ring Road, but not far from the Shunyi Olympic Rowing Park, where he occasionally rows. He has a young wife and little daughter, but it is the afternoon and they are at a local park. The apartment is cramped and only a one bedroom unit, but for Li Hua it is spacious. He grew up in the countryside in rural poverty and climbed out of that poverty with the help of a university education. And it was during university that he met his wife, who was following a similar course of study. Today they have more than either ever dreamed of as children. Despite his and his wife’s success, he hasn’t seen his parents in over 3 three years and his wife hasn’t seen hers in over five. There is the cost of travel of course, but mostly it is the time that it takes to travel that is the problem, for it is time that neither one of them has.
Li Hua is a journalist in a society generally antithetical to the very concept of journalism. At least to what the West would call unfettered journalism. He writes for sundry publications, many of them on the web and of limited popularity. Nevertheless, his contributions are carefully monitored by a government that has the power to single out anyone at any time for statements that cross the line into territory not favored by the political and media elites that hold sway over such matters. As a result, Li Hua has learned to be very circumspect in his public work, careful not to offend. And this has suited his purposes well, granting him easy access to other journalists and Chinese citizens across the spectrum of society, a wholly limitless resource.
Really, it is a gushing fountain of subterranean information. With a tightly controlled public sphere, there is so much more beneath the surface, and much of it is under enormous pressure to reach that surface in any way that it can. There are the tens of thousands of strikes across the country occurring every year, as workers strive to better their working conditions. Often enough, these strikes are not much more than protests against local corporate corruption and the perverse incentives of a system that rewards grievous levels of mendacity at the expense of virtually everything else. But the corruption goes far beyond the boundaries of business to invade almost every aspect of political and social life. From government policies such as one child that deliberately favor the urban and the rich, to those which punish the violators of the same policy with confiscatory fines and forced abortion. From the hundreds of gulags of politically prosecuted dissidents to the ranks of the tens of thousands of the disappeared and their families lies the truth. Li Hua has documented hundreds of such cases from every region of the country. But it is the use of internal government documents estimating the real depth and breadth of civil breakdown, human rights abuses, and outright lawlessness that demonstrate the effects of an unprecedented challenge to existing authority.
From the days of the Tang Dynasty in the six hundreds rose the nine ranks system, establishing a civil service which eventually came to be recognized for its basis in the merit of the individual and the ability to pass entrance examinations for various positions. It was a form of Imperial examination, with its first pin immediately under the Emperor himself, down to its lowest pin or rank at the level of local judge. Influenced by Confucianism, the bureaucrat was also, by necessity, a scholar. As such, he was a humanist and believed in the perfectibility of man. Later he was to be called Mandarin, from the Portuguese. However, the system of examination ended in 1905, eventually to be followed by Communism.
Those days are forever gone. Maintaining an orderly society, always a pre-eminent concern of the national government, has transmogrified into perpetuating a police state with tentacles in every aspect of daily life. Li Hua has done his best to detail the chaos unleashed, the trail of human devastation that it has left in its wake, the anguish of the families of the disappeared, and the stifling half-lives that so many are reduced to. He has done his best to reveal the structure of comprehensive surveillance under which everyone lives, or tries to. To show how a society can be controlled by limiting access to information from the outside and exploiting control of the principal media, especially that most important of all media, television. How China has dozens of reporters in jail, more than any other country. How the Central Propaganda Department, headquartered prominently on the Avenue of Eternal Peace in Beijing, controlled all the country’s media with its directives. He has attempted to demonstrate how many of the country’s large corporations have been permitted to operate with virtual slave labor. It has been a monumental task, requiring many years, and it has exhausted him, and his wife. He has been under increasing pressure to finish his work, and he believes there are some who may have come to suspect his effort among the thousands that lie within the web of his contacts. It is best to be done as soon as possible.
He loads a memory stick, deleting, scouring every vestige from his drive, and believes he is not far from his goal.
Chapter 3
On Fire Page 2