by Guy Sorman
Such journalism, at the outer edge of the permissible, involves great risks. A notable case in September 2005 was that of Shi Tao, a Hunan journalist sentenced to ten years of prison for divulging state secrets. All he had done was publish the Propaganda Department’s directives on the Internet. The purpose of this was to restore order and remind journalists that they could only practice their profession under the watchful eye of the Party. It also brought to light the collusion between the Chinese police and Yahoo, which had turned informer: Shi Tao had used his Yahoo address to send his message. When the CEO of Yahoo, of Chinese origin, was attacked by the American media for disclosing the name of the journalist, he offered the following justification: “We respect the customs of the countries where we do business.” Which customs was he talking about? In acting the way it did, Yahoo was not complying with any law or even a written order of the police; all it did was use the same methods of censorship and turning informant as the Party. As a token of gratitude for this respect of Chinese customs, Yahoo was allowed to repurchase the portal Ali Baba, a very un-Chinese name. Whom did Yahoo invite to celebrate the occasion? Bill Clinton! And he was careful not to mention Shi Tao’s name. Not to be outdone, Google removed the word “democracy” from its search engine and showed Taiwan as part of China. This is symptomatic of the unholy alliance that exists between the multinationals and the Party, one that has the blessings of a former U.S. president.
Yan says: “China is a threat to the West not because it sells cheap textiles and goods but because it is undermining the very principles on which Western society is founded: the respect for human rights, keeping one’s word, and abiding by contracts.” Clinton’s praise of an American company that turned informer when it was convenient to do so was not merely straying from sound business practice in the face of fierce competition; it also dealt a blow to the American spirit. It was a tactical error as well. Making concessions for communist, not Chinese, customs is colluding with a regime that the Chinese despise. Yan is taken aback by the West’s pusillanimity. He asks us to show more courage and not to give the Party the legitimacy that the Chinese deny it.
The day this interview took place, forty-two Chinese journalists in addition to Shi Tao went to prison for “divulging State secrets.” The only crime of two of the journalists was to have revealed a new case of atypical pneumonia (SARS) in Guangzhou just a few hours before the municipal authorities officially acknowledged it. Another was guilty of procuring a copy of the president’s speech to Party cadres, in which he expressed concern about the threat from democrats and men of religion.
The following month, Yan conceded that I was on the side of the Chinese democrats, an unusual position for a Frenchman. So he told me of his third identity. He posts on the Internet the results of field studies not considered worthy for internal publication. He reports life as it is lived every day in China. Some of his stories are edifying, others tragic. These vignettes, while considered too inconsequential for the internal publication, are considered too disturbing for public consumption. Why does he run such a risk? It is here alone that he can be true to his calling as a journalist. Who are his readers? He does not really know, but the website was sufficiently embarrassing for the Propaganda Department to block it. So Yan created another one. It is a constant race with the authorities. They keep blocking websites and e-mails they do not like; they spread viruses in message boxes and filter out what is forbidden. The mere mention of Taiwan is enough for a site to be destroyed. Mails containing the name of the Chinese head of state—worse still, that of the Taiwanese president or the word “democracy”—will never reach the people they are sent to. The Internet is a battlefield on which the authorities and democrats fight it out, honing their technical and semantic skills in the bargain. After browsing on the Internet, however, I note that it does appear that the 10,000 censors whom the Propaganda Department employs especially for this purpose are being outwitted by the ingenuity and sheer number of troublemakers.
The Internet has become the main source of information for the Chinese, with Internet users outnumbering the readers of the written press. People are generally well-informed, Yan says; they may not know the details but they have the general picture. What do those not connected on the Internet do? Even in the villages, there are teachers and Party cadres who surf the web and share gossip. For the discerning ones who can decipher the official press, there is much to be gleaned from it: the varying shades of censorship are so many signals to decode.
Yan feared that he may have said too much. He asked me if I would quote him. It was obvious, though, that Yan was yet another pseudonym.
Pan against sexual hypocrisy
Surprisingly, Pan Xiuming was not under police surveillance. This was rare for the people I had spoken with in Beijing. His particular field of study did not come under any of the categories that were anathema to the Party. Pan Xiuming is China’s first sexologist. He pokes fun at the regime in a way the censors can’t understand. He was the man who translated into Chinese the Kinsey report on American sexual practices. He is trying to use the same objective method in China.
Few know about Pan. He does not use the Internet; it is hard to trace him. This “bad element” is hidden in a corner of the People’s University. His laboratory is located at the end of the corridor on the top floor of one the most run-down buildings on campus. The stench of dirty floor mops and slop pails are reminiscent of Mao’s China, as filthy as it was chaste. The second-rate treatment doesn’t bother Pan Xiuming. Like all academics of his generation, this sixty-year-old has suffered worse humiliations, of which his students have no idea. To make sure his discourse is not construed as salacious, he meets people in his office only in the presence of his wife and two Ph.D students, one of each sex. While he talks, his wife cooks dinner on a hot plate. This small team is studying the latest revolution to rock Chinese society: the sexual revolution.
Pan maintained that the Communist Party was not content to control people’s minds; since 1949, it wanted to subjugate the body as well. The Revolution denied the Chinese all pleasures of the flesh; eroticism, public or private, was banned. The “liberation” of 1949 was certainly not a sexual one. For Mao Zedong, the true revolutionary had to be clean, free of material or carnal desire; unlike the rapacious Japanese and nationalist Kuomintang soldiers, Mao’s fighters respected or feigned respect for other men’s wives. After 1949, Mao’s China became a sexual desert, at least officially; prostitution was eradicated, a success story that the communists boasted about constantly during the Sixties. Strangely enough, venereal disease did not disappear: it appears that the bestial instincts of Chinese revolutionaries had not been fully curbed. Pan said, “At the time, a sexual escapade led straight to a concentration camp. Homosexuality was liable to capital punishment.” A totalitarian regime has never been able to accept any apolitical form of pleasure because it is viewed as a rival. Since 1980, the single-child policy was yet another reason to deny the Chinese their sexuality. Men were sent off to work in places far from their wives. A couple could only meet for twelve days a year, during the New Year vacations. In 1990, an extramarital sexual relationship was a bourgeois crime that could lead to prison. Until 1985, all erotic passages, even the slightest hint at sexuality, were expunged from Chinese literary classics. Readers who wanted to read the classics in their full form had to smuggle them in from Hong Kong, where they appeared unabridged.
Enforced chastity has not completely disappeared: in the army, conscripts must be spotless. Any form of sexual activity faces severe reprimand. The energy of the young must first and foremost be canalized for fighting. In the academies of fine arts, the study and representation of the nude form are strictly supervised. At the Hangzhou Academy, the most reputable fine arts academy in China, I am told that the distinction between eroticism and pornography does not exist in the Chinese language; it is up to teachers to guide their students so that they do not shock public morality. Mao Zedong, of course, was the notable exception
to the puritanical rule. The memoirs of his private doctor tell us that Mao was the despoiler of many young virgins. The Great Helmsman was a cult figure and thus could do no wrong. He also made sure that no one else could enjoy his secret recipe for eternal youth.
Pan was the only scholar who explained the Revolution in terms of sexual repression and who sought to build up sexology as a social science. His desire for greater sexual freedom is not indicative of libertine propensities but is prompted by a felt need for a return to normalcy and a more humane face for post-totalitarian China. A case of freedom post coitum, perhaps.
He carries out his fieldwork with his students, investigates, and quantifies; his team started their inquiry at the university campus, and then moved on to the seediest quarters of Guangzhou and shelters of migrant workers. In his study, Pan concludes that the Chinese want to broaden their experience and try out different sexual positions. The under-forty age group believe that everything is worth trying: premarital, marital, and extramarital sex. Men have a greater tendency to abuse this newfound freedom than women—for the moment. Pan went into details that embarrassed the interpreter; modesty prevented her from translating. Even though she may have understood what was being talked about, she did not know the words in either Chinese or French. Pan helped her out, as many terms were universal. Both students nodded their heads sagaciously. It is not as if such terms are unknown in China. At the time of the Chinese Empire, there was a body of erotic literature and much-sought-after etchings that delighted Western collectors. According to Matteo Ricci, who lived in Beijing in the early seventeenth century, the city then had about 40,000 prostitutes and a considerable number of transvestites. Pan explained that this was before the eighteenth century. The emperor Kangxi, who ruled from 1661 on, was a prude and had all traces of erotic practice destroyed; the only documents to have survived belonged to foreign amateurs. There were also some manuals (a ploy to get past the censors) in circulation, intended for young couples, which could be quite salacious. Kangxi’s successors were just as repressive and imposed upon themselves, their entourage, and their people a regime of chastity that could be broken only to fulfill the needs of procreation. Did the emperor exercise his control over people’s bedrooms? In ancient China, proximity and constant social control did not permit any form of indiscretion; indulgence meant being declared an outlaw. There were pleasure spots for the affluent and sailors at ports. For the most part, though, people had lost the taste for the pleasures of the flesh. Eroticism, it seems, is not so much a natural physical drive as a conditioned social response.
The Chinese are catching up quickly, says Pan. The single-child policy justified separation; today, it legitimizes eroticism by completely dissociating sexuality from reproduction. One of the students intervened, “Men are taking more advantage of sexual freedom than women; in comparison with the West, Chinese women are modest.” The interpreter, who had found an accomplice, approved: sexual freedom is still relatively unknown for most Chinese women. Under Mao Zedong, Chinese women were conditioned to be workers, and forced to do the same physical jobs as men; in today’s China, they are reduced to objects of desire. This is evident in the advertisements of new China, which makes a fetish of them. Life is not easy for a man in China, but it is even harder for a woman. In conclusion, Pan said, the sexual revolution was by no means complete. New habits are a reaction to the deprivation of the past, and not liberation. Total liberation will come only with the Westernization he hankers for: not only to enjoy amorous postures and practices but to restore the balance of the man-woman relationship. This relationship remains far from balanced in China. Except in the artistic milieu, terms such as feminism and homosexuality are barely mentioned, if at all. For about ten years, homosexuality has not been considered an offense or a psychiatric disease. But in Beijing and Shanghai, it is still considered an aberration.
Though prostitution is banned legally, it is proliferating and rampant in the large cities. Is this also part of the process of normalization in Chinese society? Pan interprets its mass development as one of the perversions of the Communist regime: prostitution is only banned in order to facilitate its management—and corruption—by the Party and the police. In Guangzhou, there are hotels with special floors comanaged by the trade and the police. The Party holds that prostitution is useful in attracting and taking advantage of foreign investors. The fines prostitutes must pay are not high: just enough to keep them under control without deterring them. A study Pan carried out in Guangzhou reveals how courtesans are selected and directed to serve the market: second wives for Taiwanese entrepreneurs; opulent courtesans for European, Japanese, and American businessmen; peasants and unemployed women for migrant workers who are without means but required to work on construction sites and in factories. The Communist Party has steered Chinese society to cater to the imperatives of economic development. As a result, prostitution is not just entertainment. In China, sex workers are seen as part of a national strategy. A Beijing student who occasionally works as a prostitute jokingly justified her job using the Party’s vocabulary: “I am contributing to national development,” she said, “without consuming gas, which is rare in China, and without causing pollution, another national problem.”
A study by the Taipei Institute confirms Pan’s findings: 90 percent of the Taiwanese who invest in Communist China keep a second wife who gets a monthly allowance and low rent. It has been clearly demonstrated that the abundant supply of such women constitutes a major incentive for the Taiwanese investor. Does it hold the same allure for Westerners? There is no independent study on the subject, but apparently the Communist Party carried out its own investigation and concluded that European and American entrepreneurs were just as susceptible.
Liu Xia, a Jew against fascism
“I’m a Jew,” declares Liu Xia. She doesn’t look like one. Her shaved head, fine features, and long black linen robe give her the appearance of a young Zen monk or a fashion model. Is she one of the last Chinese Jews described by Pearl S. Buck in her novel Peony, published in 1948? The American novelist dedicated the epilogue to the dying Jewish community of Kaifeng that melted in the process of intermingling. She wrote, “Wherever one sees a bolder face, a livelier look, a clearer voice, a skillfully traced line making the picture clearer, a more vigorous sculpture, Israel is there. Its spirit is reborn in each generation. It is no longer, but it lives forever.”
Liu Xia is more circumspect; she feels no affinity for Peony. For her, being a Jew in China is like being a Jew in Nazi Germany in the midst of one’s persecutors. The Communist regime is no different from Nazism or fascism, she believes. She reads everything on the subject published in the West; she compares and sees no difference. China’s Jews are her dissidents, her free spirits, intellectuals, and artists, her trade-union leaders, peasant leaders, and independent priests. They are the wild grass the Communist Party is forever weeding out. Like the Jews in Nazi Germany, they are branded, categorized, watched, and eliminated.
What about the Cultural Revolution? Liu Xia says that nothing distinguishes it from Auschwitz. The Red Guards arrested and tortured anyone whose hands were clean, unsoiled by manual labor, or who had a university degree. Some 30 million people were slaughtered. The real difference is this: whereas Europe is trying to understand the reasons that led to Auschwitz in the hope of preventing it from ever happening again, such thinking is forbidden in China because the Party that ordered the Cultural Revolution is still in power. The current leaders were once Red Guards.
As in Nazi Germany, one becomes “Jewish” either by blood or by marriage, as is the case of Liu Xia. She herself is not involved in politics. She doesn’t speak much, preferring to express herself through her photography and abstract painting, shown only to her close circle of friends. When her husband Liu Xiaobo was locked up, Liu Xia created an original, moving work, using photos of dolls with deformed faces as symbols of tortured prisoners. What threat could the Party see in that? But Liu Xiaobo is a “Jew”; he tea
ches literature. For his role as a student leader in 1989, he received ten years in prison. Liu Xiaobo refuses to live in exile, choosing to fight the regime where he is. His writing is his only weapon: on the Internet, he publishes a chronicle in defense of human rights in China. The Chinese constitution enshrines human rights but only to please foreigners, for they have no concrete legal effect. He also writes occasionally for the Hong Kong press, which, sadly, is losing its independence in relation to the Party. When Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned, Liu Xia automatically became a Jew and thus wild grass. It was then that she decided to shave her head to look like her prisoner husband. On leaving prison, his spirit of resistance as strong as ever, Liu Xiaobo let his hair grow back. Not so Liu Xia. She wanted to preserve her Jewishness until the end of fascism in China.
Is she being overly grim? She invites me to their tiny flat in a Beijing suburb. Four security men are posted in front of the building. As I reach it, a camera flashes. I am being photographed through the window of a car parked there. “In the morning,” says Liu Xia, “when I draw open the curtains, the first thing I see are the security agents.” The pressure never lets up. Sometimes, for no reason, Liu Xiaobo finds himself whisked away for questioning to the Security Department in an attempt to intimidate him. The “Jewish” couple is not in prison for the simple reason that their fame outside China is protecting them. Liu Xiaobo is a member of PEN, an international association of writers concerned about human rights, among other things. The fact that the security agents see them in the company of foreigners acts as a further shield. For the moment, they are safe. But the regime could choose at any time to eliminate this wild grass. A judge could accuse them, as so many others have been accused, of selling state secrets and plotting to overthrow the government. This is the standard charge leveled against all Chinese “Jews.”
