by Guy Sorman
In comparison with the millions of victims of the civil war, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the laogaï, the Tiananmen carnage appears insignificant. Deng Xiaoping, who gave the order to shoot, was surprised by the Western outrage. Public opinion in Europe and the United States had been far less critical during Mao’s time. But that was before television. Captured on camera, Tiananmen will remain inside and outside China as the indelible stamp of the Communist Party. When China becomes a democracy, June 4 will be celebrated as a day of national commemoration. The Party fears this, for every year on this day security is reinforced in Beijing. As June 4 approaches, police cordons in the city center are tightened, mobile phones of democratic intellectuals stop working, SMS and Internet communication gets jammed, and sensitive websites are blocked. Yet despite all its might, the Communist government seems afraid of a handful of dissenters.
Our memory is short-lived
It did not take us long to forget Tiananmen. June 4, 1989, a day on which the Western world was filled with righteous anger at the massacre of students, is not so long ago. On July 14 of that year, the bicentenary of the French Revolution, dissidents who had fled from China led the parade on the Champs-Elysées. The image of Chinese students in Paris leading the parade produced as strong an emotion among the Chinese as the emotion we felt when we saw a boy standing up to a row of tanks lined along the boulevard with nothing more than his schoolbag. Europe and the United States, it appeared, had learned their lesson: there would be no repetition of the previous indifference to fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, and the Khmer Rouge. Western governments decided to take punitive action against the Chinese Communist government and placed an embargo on the sale of arms; this was the least that they could do. In France, only Alain Peyrefitte tried to rationalize the behavior of the Chinese leaders, though he did not support the repression. He said that one injustice was better than disorder and that one massacre was better than a new civil war. Simon Leys, always far more clear-sighted than the rest, anticipated that Western indignation would be short-lived; he had also been the first European to condemn the Cultural Revolution. In June 1989, he had prophesized in an epitaph to the victims that “the heads of state and businessmen would flock back to Beijing to sit again at the banquet of the assassins.” Chinese democrats who had chosen to group together in Paris realized that France valued trade more than human rights, so they left for the United States and Taiwan.
Do the dissidents in exile have any influence in China? Yes, but only with people of their own generation, bound by a common history. The younger generations have a hazy picture of what happened. Some democratic activists have chosen to merge with Western society, leading a normal life as teachers (Fang Lizhi, called the “Chinese Sakharov”), CEOs (Chai Ling), and academics (Wang Dan). No one can blame them for doing so. Wuer Kaixi says, “In China, we had no notion of individualism, love, or consumerism; everything was political and for the community. When we came to the West, we discovered all this; we were twenty and we enjoyed it.” The Communist leaders were confident that these dissidents would be incapable of finding common ground and constituting in exile a credible alternative to communism. In point of fact, the dissidents are a divided lot, of different generations, with different strategies and ambitions. The Communist Party, active outside China, does its best to maintain these divisions and ensure that the democrats gain no influence. Pressure is put on governments and organizations willing to receive Wei Jingsheng, Wuer Kaixi, and the Dalai Lama: the threat of canceling a business contract or the simple refusal to grant a visa suffices. The French president Jacques Chirac had consistently refused to meet the Dalai Lama and Wei Jingsheng when they visited France. Even so, Jacques Chirac, as the mayor of Paris, had lavished praise on the very same Dalai Lama! The Communist Party also makes sure that the overseas Chinese media do not support the dissidents. In 2004, the Communist Party discreetly bought off the New York Chinese press, influential among the Chinese community in the United States, and changed its political stance. The Party, however, cannot stop people like Wei Jingsheng and Wuer Kaixi from speaking the truth, even as it continues to lie shamelessly. The dissidents whom I met live in exile, not out of choice but out of compulsion. But there are still others who are keeping the struggle alive in China itself.
Feng Lanrui, a veteran of democracy
It was a January morning in Beijing. Some thirty-odd dishes revolved on a central tray. Heaven knows what they contained! The congealed sauces were far from appetizing, and hygiene seemed not to have been a consideration. We dug into common bowls with plastic chop-sticks and, like our hosts, slurped noisily, dropping the sauce on a dirty tablecloth that no one had bothered to change. We were in one of the many cheap eating houses that have sprung up in Beijing since the Chinese opted for private enterprise.
I remembered the formal banquets of Mao’s time. The few Western travelers were shown every courtesy, to make sure that they went back with wonderful memories. While millions of Chinese starved, foreign delegations—one could only travel to China in a group—enjoyed lavish feasts. Dishes of all kinds—sweet, sour, salted—were served to the accompaniment of the same monotonous speech, faithfully regurgitated by the local apparatchik. “Chinese cuisine and French cuisine,” he would begin ingratiatingly, “are the best cuisines in the world.” The guests would lap up these trite utterances, translated word for word by the interpreter, repeat them wondrously in French, and hear themselves translated into Chinese, after which it was time to toast. The etiquette was to down one’s drink at one go and show the empty glass; failure to do so meant having to drink three glasses. The custom has endured. One was also required to clink glasses with every guest at every table, a feat that taxed one’s ingenuity, since one had to think of a new toast each time.
The Chinese, too, would look forward to these visits, for it was the only time that they could eat to their hearts’ content, and the French, needless to say, were delighted; mellowed by compliments and delicacies, including bird’s-nest soup, they listened beatifically to Chinese propaganda. We were told that French and Chinese cuisines were better than any other in the world and that the superiority of our two civilizations was unquestionable. As the Chinese held us in such high regard, is it any wonder we went into raptures about everything Chinese? During that period, delegations of friends of China, woolly-headed intellectuals, fellow travelers of the Communist Party, and other such easy targets were happy to feast on the culinary and ideological fare offered by the regime, the massacre of millions of Chinese not troubling their pleasure in the least. We should have looked more carefully at the scullery and the chef. Now businessmen and tourists have replaced political onlookers, but the bill of fare, ladled by the minions of the Communist Party, remains unchanged. Our hostess of the day, Madam Feng Lanrui, is, however, quick to dissipate all our illusions. Madam Feng is the very embodiment of the Chinese intellectual’s endless march on the road to freedom.
“Democracy,” she said, “is a value common to all civilizations, the undivided legacy of mankind as a whole.” An innocuous remark in itself, daring only because of the place it was made. That Madam Feng chose to speak loudly and clearly in a public place was astonishing. Does the Communist regime really tolerate people who praise democracy in public? No, it is just that the dictatorship has become more intelligent. The brainwashing of the Maoist era has been discarded and dissenters are tolerated, provided that they do not organize themselves. The Communist Party judged Madam Feng incapable of starting a popular uprising, though hundreds of millions of Chinese share her aspiration for freedom. There was her age also: she was 85.
She started reminiscing. In the Sixties, had she spoken as she did, the Party would not have hesitated to send a couple of Red Guards, boys no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, to torture her and force a confession of heresy out of her. She would have been beaten till she declared her love for the Party; she would have had to confess that she had been against progress, against history
, against China, and an American agent in the bargain. Now communists no longer attack old people; the executioners of yesterday have become the businessmen of today. And they want at all costs to bury the past.
Feng said the Chinese had no memory at all; the under-forty generation knew little about the past unless someone decided to pursue the complex search for the truth. The current dictators being the direct descendants of yesterday’s dictators, the Party does its best to see that history is not handed down from one generation to the next. Textbooks are silent about the horrors of the Revolution and the spate of calamities that followed, or else the past is idealized: the famines of ’64 organized by the Party are forgotten, and the Cultural Revolution reduced to a mere outburst of secondary school pupils. Even in death, Mao continues to rule over China: the president of China, said Feng, ought to be called Mao III or Mao IV. Parents have no desire to tell their children much: the humiliations that they suffered were not the kind that they wished to share with anyone, not even their own children.
This old lady, upright, dignified, and fully alert, who had seen and lived through everything, also remembered everything—but her generation is fading away. Feng had been one of the key figures in the history of Communist China; as early as 1940, she had been by Mao’s side when she was only twenty. She said that she had been a “professional revolutionary.” Believing in the Revolution, she had obeyed the three Maoist dictates: every intellectual was an instrument of the Party; Mao’s personality was sacrosanct; the human condition was the product of the class struggle. The Maoist ideology was a systematic reversal of Confucian philosophy. Confucius said human nature existed, filial piety was a man’s foremost duty, and the learned man was obliged to point out to the emperor his error if he acted against morality. Mao Zedong negated human nature, subjugated the educated, made children spy on their parents and couples betray each other. Feng emphasized Mao’s negation of Confucianism because she knew that many courtiers of China in the West believed that the Party was the continuation of the Empire and Maoism a new form of Chinese culture; this was putting it on a pedestal and so precluding any criticism. Feng said in truth that the communists had completely devastated Chinese thought and in the process destroyed the country’s historical legacy; even today, they were busy wiping out all traces of classical China. The architects of Beijing had pleaded with Mao Zedong to preserve the old city; he had it razed to the ground. He ordered that factory chimneys replace pagodas, and his orders were carried out. Other cities met with the same fate: first ravaged in the name of the Revolution, they were now being wrecked in the name of modernization. Nowhere was the cry of the Internationale, “Let us make a blank slate of the past,” better heard than in China. The task was all the more simple given that—as even Mao acknowledged—there was not a single well-read revolutionary.
Many years after these events, Feng was still trying to understand why she had believed in the Revolution. She confessed, “The youth believed in it because it was fashionable.... The Revolution seemed necessary to rid the country of its bureaucracy, corruption, and foreign colonization.” No one had thought of the Japanese way of modernization. Japan concentrated on economic reconstruction while preserving its imperial regime; the Chinese were obsessed by the French and Russian Revolutions. “We were revolutionaries first and Marxists later; when the communists came, we rallied around them because they spoke the language of revolution.” Fifty years later, she tried to justify her actions: “Like all Chinese, I, too, was looking for freedom.”
Was it really freedom that every Chinese was aspiring for? The West had a different conception of China. Feng was infuriated by the Western indifference toward all those brave Chinese men and women fighting for democracy, many of whom had laid down their lives during their century-old struggle. Wherever the Chinese still had the right to demonstrate, they clamored for only one thing. In Hong Kong, 250,000 people gathered in December 2005, demanding that the Beijing government let them elect their leaders through universal suffrage. As for the supposed preference for enlightened despotism, Feng Lanrui pointed out that the Chinese had known of democratic ideas for over a hundred years. In 1912, Sun Yat-sen’s republican government held elections on the basis of universal suffrage; a quarter of China’s adult population took part. Women were excluded, as in Europe, but so were opium smokers and Buddhist monks. The republican Kuomintang Party got the majority, and China seemed no different from any Western democracy. The trouble was, Feng said, that the educated class in China delighted in everything new and Western. The Republic did not seem efficient enough to modernize the economy and act as bulwark against the Japanese. So on May 4, 1919, students took to the streets in Beijing, calling for a new revolution in favor of science and democracy. How this laudable objective gave rise to such a totalitarian, unscientific, and undemocratic regime was something everyone tried to explain in his own way.
The idea of cultural continuity finds favor in the West. So Mao was viewed as another chapter of the Empire, the founder of a new dynasty, ostensibly Marxist but actually in continuity with the celestial bureaucracy. To see in these peasants and workers bent on destroying old China the inheritors of the mandarins was really stretching the imagination, to say the least.
Feng provided a more reasonable explanation: the communists took advantage of their superior military organization, and the logistical support provided by the Soviet Union proved decisive. It was not Marxism but the Red Army that triumphed in Beijing in 1949, just as it had won the day in Moscow in 1917. What many described as a vast popular movement was, in point of fact, a coup d’état. That Chinese and Western intellectuals let themselves be taken in tells us more about their romanticism than the nature of the Revolution. Feng finally saw through the charade. In the early Eighties, a period of unparalleled intellectual freedom, Feng Lanrui published a series of economic works of liberal inspiration that marked her break with communism; they came to be considered as the textbooks of reformism, the nonrevolutionary way to democracy. In the spring of 1989, when the Beijing students began their uprising, she was, like many other liberal intellectuals at the time, skeptical, wary of their zeal for slogans, romantic gestures, and utopian dreams. She thought that they were ill informed about the history of their country and far too similar to the previous generation, even if they said the opposite in their slogans. The tragic end proved Feng Lanrui right: the students had failed to understand the nature of the Party.
If revolution was not the way, then how was democracy to arrive? “From the top,” said Feng. Like most Chinese intellectuals, she was looking for subtle variations in the discourse of the Politburo, hoping for a Gorbachev or a Yeltsin to destroy the system from within. Some would call this attitude excessively cautious; others would see it as growing out of the overriding Chinese fear of another civil war.
People unfamiliar with the repression in China in the time of Mao Zedong and his immediate successors will not be able to appreciate the extraordinary nature of my conversation with Feng Lanrui in Beijing. Never before in contemporary history had an entire nation been put under constant surveillance: the Chinese not only had to speak alike; they had to think alike. Other authoritarian regimes allowed their subjects some private space provided that they kept quiet. Maoism practiced thought control: people had to “think correctly” in all earnestness. Every aspect of private life was regulated by the Party: the bedroom, marriage, and sexual practices. In the Seventies, any form of feeling was anesthetized; like parrots, the Chinese had to repeat the slogan of the day. One of Mao’s quotations always prefaced any “personal conversation.” A few second-rate books were the only reading material allowed, and eight revolutionary operas provided the sole entertainment. Placed all over—in city squares, railway stations, trains, offices, and factories—loudspeakers blared out martial music from dawn to dusk, making it physically impossible for people to speak, listen, or think. The basic distinction between Maoism and Stalinism was this: the Soviet leaders knew that they were lying,
the people knew that communism was a sham, and though the lie was passed off as truth, few were taken in. Maoist leaders went further. It was not enough mechanically to regurgitate the official line. The brainwashing had to be so thorough that the Chinese internalized the lie, believing it to be the truth. The Maoist effort had more in common with the Catholic Inquisition than with atheist Stalinism. None of this has been spoken about in China because no attempt has been made to de-Maoize the country. At the behest of Deng Xiaoping in 1983, the Central Committee of the Party decided once and for all that Mao Zedong was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong. Mao had used the same formula to describe Stalin. Why 70 percent right? There are any number of reasons for the 30 percent wrong: the mass elimination of landowners at the time of the liberation, the 20 million deaths during the Great Leap Forward from 1959 to 1962, the 30 million dead on account of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 . . . the 30 percent wrong was enough to charge Mao with crimes against humanity.
That Feng survived and the Chinese retained their sanity was testimony to the people’s resistance to totalitarian savagery. Mao could no more create a homo sinicus than Stalin a homo sovieticus. Shorn of slogans and martial music, the pretense disintegrated; in its place, one found a vibrant, living people. My meeting with Madam Feng Lanrui in January 2005 was a turning point; it convinced me that I had to spend the Year of the Rooster in China, listening to its democrats; this was the least I could do.
The new generation: between Jesus and Tocqueville
Yu Jie is thirty; he could well be Feng’s grandson. In Beijing, he has taken over her struggle. He refuses exile. He says, “It is here that the Party’s cruel dictatorship is crushing the people, it is here that it has to be fought.”
