China: From Famine to Oslo
By Perry Link @ TNYRB
December 16, 2010
Each year around the “sensitive” anniversary of the Beijing massacre of June 4, 1989, Ding Zilin, a seventy-four-year-old retired professor of philosophy, is accompanied by a group of plainclothes police whenever she leaves her apartment to go buy vegetables, or to do anything else. Her son, Jiang Jielian, was killed in the massacre by a bullet in the back, and very soon thereafter Ding decided-unlike other parents who had lost children-to defy the government’s demand that the families of victims keep quiet and absorb their losses in private. She organized a group called “Tiananmen Mothers” and, in her speaking and writing ever since, has essentially said to the regime: say what you like, and do what you will, but my mind belongs to me and you cannot have it. (In October, the Tiananmen Mothers called on the Chinese government to release Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned writer who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize and who has been a longtime supporter of the group’s efforts.) Václav Havel, whom Professor Ding admires, called this “living in truth.” To the regime, it makes Ding a dangerous person.
Many people have wondered where Ding Zilin got the mental fortitude to confront a vast and potentially brutal government. Even more worth probing, in my view, is what the standoff says about the mentality of her opposition. The Chinese government is the largest in the world. It commands more soldiers than any other government, and owns about $2.5 trillion-by far the most in the world-in foreign exchange reserves. It is widely viewed as an emerging superpower. Nevertheless it sends plainclothes police to accompany a seventy-four-year-old woman as she sets out to buy vegetables. Why? The two books under review here do not have all of the answers to this question, but they illuminate it in profound ways.
Today’s “rising China,” which from the outside can seem to exude strength and confidence, inwardly lives with an unsure view of itself. People sense, even if they do not want to talk about it, that their country’s current system is grounded partly in fraud, cannot be relied upon to treat people fairly, and might not hold up. Insecurity, the new national mood, extends from laid-off migrant laborers to the men at the top of the Communist Party. The socialist slogans that the government touts are widely seen as mere panoply that covers a lawless crony capitalism in which officials themselves are primary players. This incongruity has been in place for many years and no longer fools anyone. People take it as normal, but that very normality makes cynicism the public ideology. Many people turn to materialism-whether in property or investment-in search of value, but often cannot feel secure there, either; even if they gain a bit of wealth, they do not know when it might disappear or be wrested away.
One stopgap that top leaders have used has been to stoke national pride. They have staged an Olympics and a World’s Fair. They arrange to broadcast throughout China that the Dalai Lama is a “wolf” who would “split the motherland.” Such tactics have had some success. Chauvinist sentiment, especially among the upwardly mobile urban young, is easy to provoke, and is sometimes loudly expressed.
Yet in quieter settings, Chinese people continue to make decisions that reflect their lack of confidence in China’s future. Farmers from Fujian province still pay “snakeheads” tens of thousands of dollars to smuggle one person to Sydney, London, or New York. Of the approximately 145,000 Chinese students who go abroad each year for study, only about 25-30 percent return to live in China (and of these, some keep foreign passports tucked away). Even leaders of the Communist Party send their children-and large amounts of their money-to places like Vancouver and Los Angeles. An elderly man in Hu Fayun’s novel Ruyan@sars.come observes that
here [in China], who knows when all hell might break loose, leaving no place to hide?… Everyone feels this at a certain level but doesn’t say so. Why else would the people who hold all the power in our society be sending their sons and daughters abroad?
Read the entire review at The New York Review of Books.
December 16, 2010
Each year around the “sensitive” anniversary of the Beijing massacre of June 4, 1989, Ding Zilin, a seventy-four-year-old retired professor of philosophy, is accompanied by a group of plainclothes police whenever she leaves her apartment to go buy vegetables, or to do anything else. Her son, Jiang Jielian, was killed in the massacre by a bullet in the back, and very soon thereafter Ding decided-unlike other parents who had lost children-to defy the government’s demand that the families of victims keep quiet and absorb their losses in private. She organized a group called “Tiananmen Mothers” and, in her speaking and writing ever since, has essentially said to the regime: say what you like, and do what you will, but my mind belongs to me and you cannot have it. (In October, the Tiananmen Mothers called on the Chinese government to release Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned writer who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize and who has been a longtime supporter of the group’s efforts.) Václav Havel, whom Professor Ding admires, called this “living in truth.” To the regime, it makes Ding a dangerous person.
Many people have wondered where Ding Zilin got the mental fortitude to confront a vast and potentially brutal government. Even more worth probing, in my view, is what the standoff says about the mentality of her opposition. The Chinese government is the largest in the world. It commands more soldiers than any other government, and owns about $2.5 trillion-by far the most in the world-in foreign exchange reserves. It is widely viewed as an emerging superpower. Nevertheless it sends plainclothes police to accompany a seventy-four-year-old woman as she sets out to buy vegetables. Why? The two books under review here do not have all of the answers to this question, but they illuminate it in profound ways.
Today’s “rising China,” which from the outside can seem to exude strength and confidence, inwardly lives with an unsure view of itself. People sense, even if they do not want to talk about it, that their country’s current system is grounded partly in fraud, cannot be relied upon to treat people fairly, and might not hold up. Insecurity, the new national mood, extends from laid-off migrant laborers to the men at the top of the Communist Party. The socialist slogans that the government touts are widely seen as mere panoply that covers a lawless crony capitalism in which officials themselves are primary players. This incongruity has been in place for many years and no longer fools anyone. People take it as normal, but that very normality makes cynicism the public ideology. Many people turn to materialism-whether in property or investment-in search of value, but often cannot feel secure there, either; even if they gain a bit of wealth, they do not know when it might disappear or be wrested away.
One stopgap that top leaders have used has been to stoke national pride. They have staged an Olympics and a World’s Fair. They arrange to broadcast throughout China that the Dalai Lama is a “wolf” who would “split the motherland.” Such tactics have had some success. Chauvinist sentiment, especially among the upwardly mobile urban young, is easy to provoke, and is sometimes loudly expressed.
Yet in quieter settings, Chinese people continue to make decisions that reflect their lack of confidence in China’s future. Farmers from Fujian province still pay “snakeheads” tens of thousands of dollars to smuggle one person to Sydney, London, or New York. Of the approximately 145,000 Chinese students who go abroad each year for study, only about 25-30 percent return to live in China (and of these, some keep foreign passports tucked away). Even leaders of the Communist Party send their children-and large amounts of their money-to places like Vancouver and Los Angeles. An elderly man in Hu Fayun’s novel Ruyan@sars.come observes that
here [in China], who knows when all hell might break loose, leaving no place to hide?… Everyone feels this at a certain level but doesn’t say so. Why else would the people who hold all the power in our society be sending their sons and daughters abroad?
Read the entire review at The New York Review of Books.