Empire of Lies

by Guy Sorman

  All this would have been quite charming had Maguan not been one of the poorest villages in China, where local tyrants pose as democrats and pat themselves on the back for all the progress that they have made. In their own guarded way, the Maguan villagers let it be known that they were not fooled.

  Some delegates, more forthcoming than others, dare to answer my questions. While they are all for democracy, they would prefer electing their representatives at the district, rather than the village, level. Their demand is not technical but political in nature. Real decisions are taken at the district level, and the villagers know that their secretary is merely a puppet. They would also like to draw up their own agenda rather than restricting discussions to what Zheng proposes. They know that the assembly is a complete sham, convened once a year to discuss trivia like the pond when the village has no electricity, roads, drinking water, dispensary, or school. They also know that the government is not short of funds, for just a few miles away, beyond the valley and mountain, is a highway running across Guizhou from east to west. Hardly anyone uses it, since only bureaucrats can pay the toll tax. Truckers prefer the old, broken roads: they are free.

  Everyone in Maguan knows, moreover, that some provincial Party cadres have taken refuge in Australia after making their fortunes by siphoning off part of the money earmarked for the highway. The rumor mill keeps the villagers abreast of what is happening. There is no mention of scandals in the official press, which, in any case, no one reads. The peasants’ understanding of the regime, with all its rites and subterfuges, is based on their personal experience. It is difficult for them to have a global picture of the Chinese state, given the sheer size of the country and the fragmented nature of information they receive.

  “Would you like to elect your government?” I often put this question to the peasants, and silence is the only reply. Perhaps they keep quiet out of fear; it is also true that the Party discourages any attempt on their part to broaden their thinking.

  Reformism, the small-step theory

  We, as foreign observers, tend to analyze the situation in China through the prism of our history and our habits—so are we underestimating China’s march toward democracy? Are local elections fostering the democratic spirit in Chinese peasants, the Party notwithstanding? The American foundations in China are convinced that this is the case. Some Chinese human rights activists, calling themselves “reformers” rather than “liberals,” subscribe to the same view. Among these bold men are a few lawyers, a new profession in China, just as law and its codification are recent creations. Most lawyers confine their practices to commercial cases or civil suits that pose no challenge to the political institutions; a few use the courts to advance the concept of the rule of law.

  “I lose practically all the time,” admits Pu Zhiqiang, an activist in Beijing who specializes in media-related cases. A few newspapers are bold enough to expose the corrupt practices of firms and Party cadres. They are harassed by the Security and Propaganda Departments; if that doesn’t work, the next step is a libel suit. Either the paper goes bankrupt because of the heavy fine imposed on it, or it is banned. Pu loses his cases, but he continues to plead. A giant man with a booming voice, he is difficult to silence. His size is the subject for much mirth in media circles; the joke is that the police can’t arrest him because they’d need at least ten men to hold him.

  “What matters is to plead,” Pu says. By taking these cases to court, he is trying to instill the notions of law, trial, and justice in Chinese society. He also hopes to stir the judges out of their inertia, caught as they are between his legal arguments and the instructions of their actual boss, the Party secretary. Pu dwells constantly on the fact that law does exist in China: there are laws, decrees, and a constitution. The problem is that hardly anyone dares make recourse to the law to get grievances redressed. Since the constitution makes mention of human rights from 2004 onward—though it does not confer any real rights on citizens—Pu never fails to invoke them. Talking about human rights and the constitution is part of his method of teaching democracy. The very fact of taking a company boss or a political leader to court, he says, is a way of bringing about greater accountability in a regime where nameless individuals make decisions. When unmasking fraud, corruption, or violence inflicted on citizens, Pu gives the names of the people involved. And sometimes he wins.

  Some of the newspapers that he represented won their libel suits and received damages. Similarly, city apartment owners and rural landowners whose property was unfairly expropriated have been compensated. Pu wins because the Party has ordered it so. Doesn’t that make him a pawn in the hands of the Party? Aren’t his rare victories a ploy to give credibility to the legal system? Isn’t this a convenient way of proving that the courts are real, judges independent, the press free, and property safe? Of course it’s a game, concedes Pu. The local elections are charades, too. But this charade may just compel the Party to respect the rule of law after the people discover its virtues. Every small step in that direction is thus worth the effort.

  The well-known Tiananmen dissident and workers’ leader Han Dongfang is a reformist like Pu. After spending two years in a Chinese prison, he took refuge in Hong Kong. Han is often called the “Chinese Lech Walesa,” since he decided in 1989 to organize a trade-union movement in China. Han rejects such comparisons. He says: “Solidarity was a political union whose main purpose was to overthrow the Communist regime.” Han is more modest: he aims only to protect the rights of wage earners long held in contempt in China. From his Hong Kong base, he keeps track of labor disputes on the mainland, which he tries to resolve with the help of Chinese labor laws. Like human rights, these exist but are never applied. Working by phone, he persuades strikers to eschew violence and to go to court instead. His organization, China Labor Bulletin, has the support of Western unions and pays the Beijing lawyers’ fees. Only they are independent enough to take on the provincial magistrates. (In China, 70 percent of trials have no lawyers.) Through a combination of media pressure, pleas, and negotiations, the workers manage sometimes to get redress after an industrial injury or an arbitrary layoff.

  These may appear like small victories in a vast country like China, but they do bring about change in the lives of some of the complainants. Like Pu, Han exhorts their educational value. Instead of chafing and wanting to revolt, workers begin to discover the virtues of the rule of law. Are these workers, who are exploited by managers working hand-in-glove with the Party, the best disciples? It is a tenuous situation, indeed: judges have no independence, the laws are ambiguous, and Han heads an apolitical movement based outside China with foreign support. He insists that he is anchored in the Left—whether out of convenience or genuine conviction is hard to say. His Left, he specifies, is the new Chinese Left; while not hostile to the Communist Party, it wants to purge it of its “neoliberal deviation” and bring it back to genuine socialism.

  Han Dongfang and Pu Zhiqiang are part of the great intellectual upheaval in favor of the rule of law. To buttress their theory, they say that a new generation of magistrates, often women, is emerging in China, determined to discharge their duties independently and to fight corruption. Stéphanie Balme, a French political analyst, compares them to the group of honest Italian judges in the Eighties who stamped out the Mafia. The comparison seems rather far-fetched, for Italy was and is a pluralistic democracy. China has a long way to go. In 2005, 97 percent of criminal cases ended in conviction; two-thirds of the accused did not have lawyers, and the only testimony recorded was that of the policemen. As things stand, the main task of the courts is not to dispense justice but to strengthen the social order.

  The reformers have not lost heart, however. Wang Yi, a young academic from Chengdu, has set out their theoretical premises most explicitly. He says that though the Communist Party has no legitimacy even in China, it has no intention of giving up power or reforming the regime from the top, as Gorbachev did. Thus there are two paths for China to move toward “democratic normalcy�
��: direct confrontation, as advocated by such “liberals” as Yu Jie, a Chinese dissident, and Wei Jingsheng, based abroad; and the “reformist” path to which he subscribes. Instead of confrontation with the Party, the reformers use all available legal means to create awareness about the rule of law and the role of civil society. As none of their actions poses a direct threat to the Party, they manage to score a few legal victories. The virtue of this reformism is that it will spare the country violence, be it that of the Party or of an angry people. At the end of this long march to the rule of law, the Chinese will have constituted themselves into a politically aware society, and the passage to democracy will thus become the natural outcome of China’s modernization. How many years will it take to achieve such normalcy? About thirty, reckons Wang Yi, by which time he will have turned sixty-five, the age to assume responsibility in China.

  The reformist theory is baffling, since it assumes that the relationship between the reformers and the communists will remain unchanged for the next thirty years, impervious to any new development. Moreover, it displays the same Confucian condescension toward the people. Like the communists and neo-Confucianists, Wang Yi believes that experts and intellectuals have to educate the people before they can decide democratically what is good for them.

  Are we in a position to judge from the outside? The novelist Mo Yan, famous both in China and the West for his book The Red Sorghum and the film based on it, tells me: “We have suffered so much that any small step toward light is perceived as an immense liberation.” Not having experienced the same suffering, we would do well to listen to Pu Zhiqiang, Han Dongfang, Wang Yi, and Mo Yan, as well as their brothers in arms who favor a more radical concept of democracy.

  When the Chinese voted supergirl

  As we look for signs of greater freedom in China, I often wonder whether we are focusing on the right things. I sometimes believe that legalism, reformism, protest, and dissidence are not the real vehicles of change. Perhaps it is coming from elsewhere: blogs, text messaging, posters, clandestine masses. And things are changing here much faster than the democratic activists and the Communist Party imagine. There is a movement away from conventional politics; a new course is being charted that does not follow any of the conventional patterns of transition from dictatorship to liberal democracy. Some think change will come from religion; I am inclined to think it will come from the mass media.

  Miss Li Yuchun, aged twenty-one, may have shown the way to freedom more clearly than any intellectual or democratic activist. In the summer of this Year of the Rooster, 400 million Chinese were busy adulating Miss Li without the Party’s being in the know; its censors and intellectuals had never heard of her. Li, a young girl from Sichuan Province, was one of the 200,000 contestants in a televised singing contest based on the TV show American Idol. The format of this contest for amateur singers has been replicated the world over. In China, the program, known as Supergirl, is telecast by a satellite channel, Hunan Television, and sponsored by a private firm: the show’s full name is Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Supergirl. There is hardly anything cultural or national about the contest, but it does provide a bit of spice. The number of viewers increases with each episode, with the figures crossing the 400 million mark for the final one. Viewers vote by text messaging to choose the winner. Miss Li received 4 million votes, a national score no official has ever reached, even though text-message voting is contingent on owning a mobile phone, thus limiting the number of people who can vote, and is not free.

  Elsewhere, the story of Miss Li would have remained confined to the world of showbiz. But we happen to be in China. The Communist Party, shaken by the figures, decided to put Supergirl in its proper political and moral perspective. On the eve of Miss Li’s election, an editorial in the official press said that her story was symptomatic of the deleterious effect of democracy: Miss Li was chosen “spontaneously, without any artistic education,” setting “a bad example for the Chinese youth.” Those who voted for her were even more to blame, because they had selected a nonprofessional “who could barely sing” and “who was not the most beautiful.” Taken to task by the Hong Kong press, the editorialist, a certain Raymond Zhou, felt obliged to justify his stand. After consultations with the “cultural milieu,” he said his was the “authoritative” opinion. When decoded, this means that Zhou is the mouthpiece of the Propaganda Department, on which his paper, China Daily, depends.

  It is true that Miss Li Yuchun, with her tall, lean frame, boyish clothes, and spiked hair (“a tomboy,” wrote Zhou), does not conform to the sugary aesthetic canons that public Chinese television, CCTV, inflicts on its viewers every Saturday evening. The Party saw the writing on the wall: Miss Li’s election was mutiny. This is what “unprepared democracy” leads to, concluded the Propaganda Department’s editorialist. Left to their own devices, the Chinese chose one of their own, not a mechanical robot, to represent them.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Savage State

  The Chinese state is not like any other state. Yet at first glance, Western observers fail to see anything out of the ordinary. The Communist Party has taken good care to bury its revolutionary origins and to adopt the international language of economic efficiency and social order. Like any other government, it borrows from an internationally accepted political, diplomatic, and administrative lexicon. China has a president, a prime minister, an assembly, a constitution, and laws, so how is it different from other countries?

  So the state has maintained appearances, but in truth Chinese laws are worthless and exist only on paper. Those in command operate behind the scenes. The Party hierarchy, the only hierarchy that matters, consists of faceless individuals. The Party’s Central Committee meetings are held in the utmost secrecy; most Chinese do not even know the names of its members. The silence and elusiveness of a leadership accountable to no one has permeated from the top of the Party to its lowest levels. Local cadres terrorize the people daily. No state is ever innocent, but the Chinese Communist Party has crossed all bounds and demonstrated its extraordinary capacity to kill, steal, and lie. On June 4, 1989, Madam Ding Zilin discovered just how savage the Chinese state was.

  Ding Zilin, undaunted by the executioners

  It was the evening of June 3. Ding Zilin’s seventeen-year-old son, Jiang Liangjie, went to meet his friends at Tiananmen Square, despite her telling him not to. Ding Zilin worked at a university. In the normal course of events, she would have eventually become a dignified, white-haired professor enjoying retired life. But on the morning of June 4, she was summoned to identify the bullet-riddled body of her son in a Beijing hospital. Sixteen years later, she is still groping for answers. Why did the Party kill her son? Who shot him and on whose orders? To date, there has been no reply.

  For two years after the shooting, a distraught Ding Zilin could think of nothing but suicide. She felt guilty for not having stopped her young son from going out. She wondered whether he had been killed for doing something wrong. As any mention of Tiananmen was prohibited, Ding Zilin did not know that other parents, as isolated as she was, shared her grief and bewilderment. Two years went by before she learned that the International Red Cross had put the number of casualties on June 4 at 2,800 dead and an equal number injured. Who were these people and where did they come from? Many families never got any news of their children, their dear ones, their friends. Since most bodies remained untraceable, relatives and friends of victims were not sure whether they were dead or alive. People could not mourn for their dead, whose souls were condemned to drift in perpetuity while their relatives wallowed in despair. (The same brutality was displayed in the December 2004 massacre of Dongzhou villagers. The police removed the bodies of the victims, rendering it impossible to count the dead or ascertain the exact cause of death.)

  In 1991, Prime Minister Li Peng, who had ordered the Tiananmen shootings in consultation with Deng Xiaoping, stated the Party’s position, which has not changed since: in view of the families’ desire for silence and secrecy, th
e names of the victims would not be released. Ding Zilin was outraged when she heard the blatant lie. She shed her grief and decided to fight, writing to the prime minister and telling him that the victims’ families desired truth, not secrecy. A Hong Kong journalist to whom she had described her anger reported her comments. For this, the state arrested her and her husband, also a professor; interrogated, threatened, harassed, and watched them; and forced them into retirement. Their crime: “They had hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”

  Ding Zilin and others of her generation have gone through far too much to be afraid. After countless horrors, exterminations, revolutions, and purges, they have nothing left to fear. And so, in spite of her limited energy, Ding Zilin is doing her best to make a list of the Tiananmen victims. This is grueling work. What makes it even harder is that most of the victims were students from other provinces whose families are scattered all over the country. Innocent bystanders, too, were caught in the shooting: passersby, laborers from neighboring worksites, peasants bringing their produce to the capital, doctors who came to the rescue of the demonstrators—all of them perished in a relentless volley of machine-gun shots. It was a massacre.