by Han Han
Finally I’d like to share with you that song of Luo Dayou’s—one I’ve always liked—as a way of expressing our hope that the people of North Korea can live better lives or at least not starve, and also to remind ourselves that once you’re lost in the bitter sea, it’s so hard to get out of it.
The orphan of Asia weeps in the wind
Red mud on sallow chin
White terror in brown eyes
West wind wails in eastern skies
Nobody plays straight, my boy
Everyone wants your favorite toy
So much searching up and down
For answers that just can’t be found
So many sighs of despair at night
So many tears just out of view
Mother dear, how can this be right
Mother dear, how can this be true
Protect the—[unacceptable input]
September 12, 2010
Some friends have asked me why I’m not taking a stand on the Diaoyu Islands incident and condemning Japan.30 What I tell them is: Even though none of the earth under my feet is my own, I still pay a lot of attention to issues about territory. When I first heard about this business, I dashed off a comment online with great conviction: “Protect the Diaoyu Islands!” But the result was that the chat room host told me I was trying to publish illegal content and asked me to revise what I’d written. I racked my brains to think of another way to put it, and it was only when I altered the post to read “Protect the Senkaku Islands” that it could be published without further ado.
This latest contretemps is truly a major incident, one that has compelled the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to work through the weekend on formulating a protest statement. If you’re enjoying a perfect life, with wife and child, house and car, work and leisure, health and fitness all in perfect shape, then, if you’re appropriately stirred by patriotic sentiment and in no mood to “conceal your strength and bide your time,” then of course you should feel free to protect the Diaoyu Islands. But if there are things in your life not quite so secure, my feeling is that you should attend to them first, rather than worrying about something so remote.
But perhaps you will say to me, “When the big issues are so clear-cut, what do one’s own personal little losses amount to?” That’s true, but people have the right to define for themselves what the big issues are. In this case, for example, I think first we have to look at the government’s attitude—how can you rush ahead of the leadership? If the leadership denounces Japan’s actions, that means they want you to condemn them too, but if they simply express regret, that means you can put a stop to your denunciations. If the leadership wants denunciation and you want to take action, that reaches the limit of what the leadership can tolerate, and if you really take action the leadership will have to punish you, because the leadership is playing a game of chess with a lot of pieces and since you’re just a single piece, how have you got the right to jump right off the board? And on this board you are a black piece, whereas the leadership is a white one, in part because the working people are bound to be a bit darker-skinned. Black is the color that suits you best, but the most important thing is, the leadership that is already washed white wants you to sing blackface when you charge forward, whereas at the key moment they will sing whiteface.31 If you’re unlucky you’ll find out later that the leadership has happily struck a business deal with the supposed aggressors.
Regarding the Diaoyu Islands issue, I am sure that our government’s primary concern is its firm control over the domestic situation; whether there is oil under the sea is not so much what’s on their minds. Oil is what the Japanese want, and that’s why they suddenly got so interested in the islands in the 1970s. But the Chinese government only cares about stability—they don’t want any unpredictable risks in foreign relations or military affairs, and so this has caused an issue which isn’t actually all that complicated to be dragged out interminably. There may well be another area on our borders that is similarly controversial and capable of provoking friction and local hostilities with neighboring countries, but just as long as it’s not very big and its loss would not affect China’s chicken-like shape and it’s located in some out-of-the-way corner that the people and the media don’t know much about, the government may well feel that it’s best to be somewhat accommodating and treat it as though it’s already been sold off to a real estate mogul, since neither rooster nor hen are all that bothered about it. But the Diaoyu Islands have often been in the news these last few decades, so public attention is high, particularly after all those scenes on TV of our leaders receiving foreign dignitaries at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse. It would be just too embarrassing if after all this fuss Diaoyutai ends up in someone else’s hands, and so pressing the claim for the Diaoyu Islands has become a matter of pride for the government, and I’m confident they won’t be ceded to another country any time soon. But for the Chinese government, the best solution is to keep on dragging things out, delaying things until there’s another shift in the tectonic plate, so that the Diaoyu Islands directly get tacked onto Fujian Province, for that will make things a lot simpler, and we can sort out questions of underwater petroleum some other time. So I’m not worried that the Diaoyu Islands will be occupied by the Japanese, even though in fact they’ve already pretty much done that. And in terms of this current incident, the best outcome is that the captain is held for ten days, and after nine days of us strongly condemning and gravely protesting, the Japanese let the guy go, for that way finally our protests have borne fruit. As for the people who sing blackface, of course it does no harm to sing when they’ve got nothing better to do with their time, so long as they don’t get into it too deeply and don’t let it affect their lives, for don’t forget that it’s even more important to protect the things that you and your family should have, and don’t get upset if you find that you’ve already drained your cup and the leadership hasn’t even opened its bottle, and don’t imagine that you’re really responding to the nation’s greatest emergency, for the nation has a lot more pressing issues than this.
Should we or shouldn’t we?
September 19, 2010
Yesterday, September 18—a sensitive date in China32—some of my friends debated whether or not to take to the streets, since it seems there is no objection to us demonstrating against Japan, for the Diaoyu Islands, and for our fishing-boat captain. Finally, in a nation where in many chat rooms it’s impossible even to type the word demonstrate, we are free to demonstrate. So should we or should we not take part in a demo on this subject?
First of all, I think it’s true to say we have three classes in Chinese society today: masters, slaves, and dogs. But often a person may take on double roles. As for which two roles these are, I doubt that anyone is going to feel that he’s playing the master. Not long ago, the masters needed slaves to echo their words and wait on them hand and foot, but now they need dogs to do some barking, and according to dog logic, no matter how it’s treated by its master, it always has to protect the property whenever an outsider encroaches.
Keeping this point in mind helps us to think more clearly about the question. But the good thing is: We also have one more choice, simply to remain spectators. Why would we choose to do that? In the eyes of the powers that be, the difference between a little thing and a big thing is simply that the first may provoke one protest and the second may provoke eleven; the site of real privilege and authority has not exerted itself in any way; apart from calling in the Japanese ambassador multiple times, our diplomats are quite composed; and we don’t see any real determination on the part of our government to take retaliatory measures—no economic sanctions, never mind a show of military force. They’re hiding their strength and biding their time, so we might as well just do the same. After all, it’s enough that we are dogs—why reduce ourselves to the role of dogs that perform tricks to order?
If we take a good look at how things have developed, it seems that our leaders are not really that indignant—they
just feel useless, so naturally we feel useless along with them. How would it make sense to take to the streets to show how useless you feel—doesn’t that show you’re even more of a no-hoper? When the leaders lose face, we try to give them a boost, but when they have face they slap us down. When I am abused, I can’t protest, but when you are abused you want me to protest—isn’t that humiliating?
“Well,” you say, “this incident involves our whole nation, our national territory—it’s a case of us all being bullied. Even if the government doesn’t act, your life is in such a mess that you’ve got nothing to lose, so why not put yourself in the front line?” Yes, I could do that, but my strong opinion is that it’s the government’s job to do something, and that’s a lot more important than us protesting against the Japanese, because territorial issues have never been things that the people at large can solve or should try to resolve—particularly in our country, where ordinary people don’t even own an inch of land, where all land is leased from the government. For me, what this issue amounts to in the end is my landlord wrangling with someone else about a fallen tile. The tile fell off the landlord’s roof in a gale, but the landlord doesn’t dare pick it up, because that might lead to a fight with the neighbor. So why would we tenants want to get mixed up in this? People who’ve got no land to their name go to fight for someone else’s land, people stripped of dignity fight to defend someone else’s dignity—just how low can you fall?
But it is true that a demonstration on this occasion would be safe, fun, and cool, and the biggest thing in its favor is that after the demo is over you can still work and study normally and you may even get credit for it in the future, so it does no harm for university students and ordinary people to join in—it gives them the chance to try something new and sing blackface. If the government sings whiteface, maybe it will have some effect. What’s more, there’s a difference between those who join in a demonstration now and those who did so before: In the past there was no distinction between nation and government, and protestors could be sold out by the authorities without it ever occurring to them that they should object, whereas now many young people are capable of understanding more fully what this whole patriotism business is about, and although they are still indignant they have begun to reflect on the causes of their uselessness and passivity, and looking back they can consider more objectively the relationship between the nation and the government, so this is some kind of progress. In any society, the nation is like a woman and the party in power is like a man who possesses her. There are happy, ideal partnerships, there are harmonious relationships, and there are cases of domestic violence and tense relations; there are women who divorce and remarry and others who are never given the chance to remarry, but however it works out, when you love a woman you can’t love her man at the same time.
In the end, none of these things matter. What matters is if today I can demonstrate in support of Tang Fuzhen and Xie Chaoping,33 then tomorrow I will certainly feel a lot more like taking to the streets in support of the Diaoyu Islands and the Olympic torch. But there’s something wrong with that argument: If you actually can demonstrate in support of Tang Fuzhen and Xie Chaoping, it’s highly unlikely that there will be issues with the Diaoyu Islands and the Olympic torch and it’s even less likely that the Tang and Xie incidents would take place in the first place. When a people cannot demonstrate peacefully in response to a domestic problem, any protest they make about something external has no more meaning than a dance extravaganza.
Do we need the truth, or just the truth that fits our needs?
January 2, 2011
It’s been a week since Village Chief Qian’s tragic death.34 Yesterday marked the seventh day of Buddhist mourning, and the uproar has still not subsided. I read up on the story as soon as I could, and like everyone else I was outraged by the Leqing police spokesman’s dismissive remark, “There’s no logical explanation for why he died in such unusual circumstances.” But I have let days pass without writing anything about this, because I am not sure what actually happened. A week ago I was chatting with some friends online and one of them said, “It’s really terrible! In Wenzhou somebody was held down on the ground by four security officers, and then a construction vehicle came and ran him over, crushing him to death.” The friend said all this in a very confident tone, as though fully in command of the facts. At the time I didn’t know the story of how this whole thing unraveled and responded offhandedly with the comment, “Why did they have to hire four security guards to hold him down? The more people involved, the easier for the facts to emerge.” Only after I got back home did I find out more. Although there were still some questions in my mind, I too was inclined to believe that Chief Qian had been murdered, or at least that there had been some monkey business. But still I hesitated to comment, because I knew that this was simply the story that I needed to hear, and that there was a chance it wasn’t quite what had happened.
My family is from a village on the outskirts of Shanghai, an area where large swathes of land are often appropriated at rock-bottom prices, with compensation set at just a few hundred yuan per square meter. Former farmland is sold off at a huge profit to chemical plants and severe pollution ensues. In the face of a river full of dead fish, the National Environmental Monitoring Center can declare that the water quality is normal, and as to why the fish have died, their conclusion is much the same as that of the Leqing police: There’s no logical explanation. Later, my home village planned Asia’s biggest logistics port, Asia’s biggest sculpture garden, and Asia’s biggest electronics emporium, but none of these projects actually has reached fruition and all that we are left with is Asia’s most poisonous chemical industry. Resenting all those land sales by the government as I do, I have a great admiration for Chief Qian. The story as we would like to hear it goes like this: An honest old village chief, engaged for years in a struggle with the local forces of evil, has been jailed multiple times for defending people’s rights, and now he has been murdered by the government—or by a loose alliance of officials and businessmen—and his death has been falsely presented as a simple traffic accident. The villagers, realizing what happened, demanded that the culprits be punished, but they have been ruthlessly suppressed by riot police. The police seized many legitimate protesters and relatives of Chief Qian, carried off the body, used coercion or bribery to silence people in the know, muzzled the media, making this an appalling miscarriage of justice.
But the question is: Is that really what happened? I know that this is a truth you and I are very happy to accept, one that we hope to see established, one that validates the burning indignation we feel about the injustices that often take place in this part of the earth. What is the real truth, I do not know, because the government often lies and, no matter whether something is true or false, always handles issues as though struggling with a guilty conscience, so I cannot entirely believe the official explanation. But nor do I trust many Internet commentators’ conjectures, because I don’t believe you can reach a reliable verdict just by looking at a photograph, nor do I believe that just by watching a couple of episodes of Lie to Me you can make a judgment about whether someone is lying or not. As for the so-called suspicious points that people came out with later, they are becoming more and more contrived, like the claim that a construction vehicle cannot possibly have covered a certain distance at a certain speed—this shows some people have got so emotional they’ve taken leave of their senses.
A bit later, some citizens’ investigation teams, including a number of lawyers, went to Leqing to look into things. Everyone naturally expected that they would not only refute the police’s story and find evidence of murder but also expose an even more sinister plot, but to everyone’s surprise the result of their investigation was basically the same as that of the police. If that is the truth, it’s a truth that a lot of people don’t need, so these investigation teams naturally aroused suspicion, becoming in the eyes of skeptics nothing more than a tour group in the pocket of the governme
nt—perhaps specifically sent to the area to soothe and placate those angry commentators. Although the process of the investigation was somewhat rushed and the evidence reviewed was incomplete, I personally have confidence in the lawyers’ and journalists’ integrity, and I’m not convinced that the government would be able to buy or train these individuals, who are not normally susceptible to pressure. Nor do I believe that the government would engage in an elaborate masquerade by sending out a citizens’ investigation team to pull wool over the eyes of the people, because officials lack this degree of intelligence and resourcefulness—if the government was so meticulous in its efforts to deceive, we wouldn’t see so many incidents handled so disastrously and there wouldn’t be such an adversarial relationship between the government and the people. The government should take advantage of this period when our naïve citizens still imagine they might get somewhere by going to Beijing to bring grievances before the central authorities to give some thought to these questions: Why do so many people not believe what you say? Why do so many people think that to murder someone who is constantly petitioning for redress is something that you are capable of doing? Why is it that people with credibility immediately become scoundrels when the result of their investigation is the same as yours? Why is it that your way of hushing things up only succeeds in drawing attention to them more? No matter whether he was murdered or whether he died in an accident, Chief Qian should rest easy in his grave, because this incident has made everyone aware of the inequity that villagers suffer and aware that the credibility of his enemies is so very weak.
