Empire of Lies

by Guy Sorman

  In fact, under British rule, the Hong Kong press was one of the freest in the world; since the transfer of power to the Communist government, it has lost a little of its freedom. Do the “journalists” of the Propaganda Department really believe anything of what they write, be it about obesity, the selflessness of the leaders, Ching Cheong the spy, or Hong Kong? There is only one plausible explanation: Big Brother believes what Big Brother says. No one else does, except for some Western sinophiles who perhaps have a vested interest in doing so. Not one asked for Ching Cheong’s release, thereby giving credence to the charge of spying. How many excesses will the Party have to commit before China’s Western friends wake up and protest?

  A chronicle of everyday repression

  Here are some more stories that appeared in local newspapers or on the Internet during the Year of the Rooster. They did not make it to the front pages of the Western press. Perhaps they were too ordinary, or perhaps they were not what the West wanted to hear about China.

  Zheng Enchong, a fifty-four-year-old Shanghai lawyer, was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for revealing state secrets. Actually, he was helping families draft a complaint against a promoter close to the Party who had taken their land illegally. Zheng is being kept in a high-security area and is not allowed to meet a lawyer.

  The Chinese minister of construction said that in the first six months of 2005, 4,000 associations and 18,000 individuals had complained against the illegal confiscation of their land. In September, 30,000 petitioners whose land had been confiscated were arrested in Beijing.

  The police used rubber bullets to disperse a group of peasants in the Shijiahe village of Henan. They were protesting the confiscation and illegal destruction of their houses. The police hired “antisocial” elements to help out.

  The Shanghai police department set up an emergency cell to deal with “political threats.” All eighty people working at the cell have been provided “high-tech surveillance equipment.”

  The Luwan court in the Shangcai district did not allow a group of complainants seeking damages from a real-estate promoter—who, they claimed, had destroyed their locality illegally—to enter the courtroom. In their absence, the court decided in favor of the promoter.

  The state telephone company China Mobile banned twenty-two text-messaging services for allowing users to send “pornographic messages.” Sending such messages by text or through the Internet is punishable by life imprisonment. Software to censor text messages, with a vocabulary of about a thousand words, was developed. Apart from sexual terms, the software flags expressions such as Falun Gong, Tiananmen, political prisoners, correction centers, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Sino-Russian border, corruption, ultranationalism, and even truth and idea.

  The day before the Dari Rulai Xingyuan Buddhist temple in Inner Mongolia—restored thanks to contributions from abroad—was to reopen, the police arrested the spiritual leader who was to have presided over the ceremony. He was charged with “inciting the people to superstition.”

  Du Hongqui, a worker at the Mingguang factory in Chongqing who had protested against layoffs, received three years’ imprisonment for “disrupting social order.”

  The police arrested a group of baby-traffickers in Fujian Province. Fifty-three boys were recovered. Each boy had been bought from his parents for 2,000 yuan and then sold for 15,000 yuan. The same gang also sold girls of various ages to work as wives, prostitutes, or domestic servants.

  Xiao Weibin, editor in chief of the magazine Dong Zhou Gong Jin in Canton, was fired for publishing an article by a former Communist Party chief who favored political reform based on Western-style separation of powers.

  Ten thousand people retired from the textile industry demonstrated at Bengbu in Anhui Province against the decrease in their pensions and the absence of medical coverage.

  The China Daily calculated the wages that public and private enterprises have still not paid to migrant workers at about 360 billion yuan. The Changzhou court sentenced Huang Jinqin to twelve years’ imprisonment for “subversion.” The journalist had circulated material in defense of human rights on the Internet.

  Authorities closed down the Internet discussion forum of Beijing University, YiTaHuTu (“Good Disorder”). The participants had brought up sensitive issues such as corruption, human rights, and Taiwan.

  The public office for “reducing poverty” awarded a prize for poverty elimination to nine deserving private organizations. The government announced that poverty would be eradicated from China in ten years.

  A piece of good news at last! The supreme court prosecutor charged 1,780 officials and magistrates with human rights violations: property theft, illegal detention, torture, atrocities committed on prisoners, acts causing death, electoral fraud. The charges came after an amendment to the constitution in 2004 protecting human rights. The beginning perhaps of a new dawn.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The End of the Party

  Is the Chinese regime still Communist? Is the Party really Communist? People asked the same questions about the Soviet Union. The distinction between ideal communism and real communism, the idea that the latter was a distortion of the former, enabled the preservation of the ideal. All those who suffered under the Soviet regime were unequivocal, however: there can be no communism other than that which exists. The Soviet Union was as Communist as it claimed to be, and China remains Communist because her leaders draw their inspiration from Marxism and Leninism.

  Her economic takeoff does not make China any less Communist, for development is the raison d’être of Marxism. The negation of individual freedom has always been part of the Marxist-Leninist credo; so have dictatorship and the single party. Besides, the Party is not contemplating changing its name; nor is it giving up its ideology or its monopoly. Its cadres continue to study Marxist-Leninist thought, learn its catechism, and attend regular refresher courses held in Party schools. What do these schools teach? Officially, the cadres are supposed to learn how to manage modern China. In 2005, the Leadership and Management Academy was launched in Shanghai; the English name was intended to give it a global flavor. Here cadres would learn “the latest methods of international and innovative leadership.” The Academy would teach them how to “coordinate the development of the economy and society.” Do the courses offered at the Academy and other Party schools meet these goals? Sadly, the answer is no. They merely regurgitate Marxist-Leninist jargon. We have to accept the fact that the Party functions like a sect, not like an inculcator of “international and innovative leadership.”

  The art of mastering jargon

  There are few places in the world where Marx and Engels continue to be presiding deities. For many years, portraits of both men adorned Tiananmen Square. But they blocked the traffic and got swept away by an endless stream of cars. Today, the only portrait in Beijing is that of Mao Zedong. Giant granite statues of the two old bearded philosophers, however, still stand before the glass façade of the Party School in Shanghai. I ask Chen Xichun, the director of studies, what subjects are taught so that the cadres can “coordinate the development of the economy and society.” I have drawn the question from one of the course titles. Because I have no desire to be branded an enemy of China, I take great care to use the official terminology and whenever possible to follow the official mind-set.

  The director appreciates this. With his closely cropped gray hair and small, round, steel-rimmed spectacles, he looks more like a military officer than an academic. He thaws somewhat and thanks me for “taking an interest in the Party’s pedagogy.” In a hopeful tone, he asks me whether I like the Party. “Do I like the Party?” I remain vague, disappointing Chen, who nonetheless decides to rid me of my “honest doubts.”

  He tells me that the cadres, tainted by excessive exposure to reality, have to come back to school every two to three years “to improve their understanding of Marxism” and to take a refresher course in ideology. Does modern management in China require a better understanding of Marxism, I as
k? Yes; I have understood correctly. Is Chen not worried that China’s reality, very different from what Marx and Engels wrote in the nineteenth century, no longer corresponds to the original vulgates? This is an important question, he replies. Evidently, I am a worthy interlocutor, even though I have made Chen waste his afternoon. I have been invited in the name of Sino-French friendship, so he cannot avoid meeting me. Before answering my question, he convenes three other professors and has tea served.

  “The teaching at the Party School,” Chen explains, “allows cadres to find the right Marxist response to new societal demands.” Societal demands? “You can’t imagine how demanding the Chinese have become toward the Party,” Chen says. “They want the Party to represent them and satisfy their demands.” All this would be quite normal in a democracy. But China is a dictatorship. Yet Chen feels that the principle of authority no longer suffices.

  “The Party has three answers to the two popular demands.” This is typical of Communist ideology and an old Chinese tradition. Everything serious is enumerated; at times, the enumeration is more important than what is being enumerated. In response to the first demand—for representation—the Party proposes former president Jiang Zemin’s theory of “Three Represents.” Every Chinese has heard of the Three Represents; they know there are three, just as they knew during the Cultural Revolution that they had to “smash the four olds” (old thoughts, old customs, old habits, and old traditions) and, with Deng Xiaoping, to engage in the “four modernizations.” But hardly anyone in China will be able to tell you just what the Three Represents or the Four Modernizations are. “One center, two bases” is a popular saying, but those who use it have forgotten that it was originally one of the Party slogans in 1987: development was the center and opening to the world the two bases. Chen maintains that the Three Represents have resolved “once and for all” the contradictions between the Party and society. “The Three Represents are a very important thought,” he says. In every medium, in every speech, the words “very important thought” are compulsory after the words “Three Represents.”

  Before the Three Represents, the Party represented—repetition is integral to indoctrination—the avant-garde of the peasants, workers, and soldiers. At the time, the Party was a revolutionary party but did not represent society as a whole; it neglected the “avant-garde experts.” I don’t bother to ask what an “avant-garde expert” is; I know the answer. He is the owner of a private enterprise to whom membership was denied by the old statutes of the Party. Now that the Party is banking on these “capitalists” to develop China, how are they to be integrated? The Three Represents have resolved the problem. The Party has moved from the representation of the revolutionary pioneers to the representation of the most advanced “productive forces” (read: “owners”), the “most advanced culture” (heaven knows what this refers to, given the miserable state of culture in China—teachers, probably), and the “fundamental interests of the largest number of the Chinese people.” Thanks to the Three Represents, the Party now represents—the repetition is hallucinatory—the “avant-garde,” the “experts,” and the “interests of the entire nation.” I have summarized in a few lines what Chen took one hour to explain.

  At the school, Party cadres listen to these lessons all the time, lulled by the humming of air conditioners. Let us continue. The new entrepreneurial class, thanks to the Three Represents, can henceforth “participate fully in the construction of the Party.” In a nutshell, owners are swelling the ranks of the Party while the number of peasants and workers is dwindling. The Party can heave a sigh of relief. Owners are certainly not going to ask for democracy. The status quo suits them, prospering as they do on account of the Party. What about women? They have never had anything more than walk-on parts. This long-winded discourse fails to address the Party’s metamorphosis into a technocratic machine and the replacement of the Reds by experts. Chen’s conclusion: as the Party henceforth represents society as a whole, “It is here to stay.” And since it represents everyone, there is no need for any other party. So a multiparty system would not represent anyone? That’s right; I have understood correctly, Chen tells me.

  Having dealt with the question of democracy through the Three Represents, the Party then had the task of “listening to the people’s demands in order to satisfy them.” Chen calls it a “question of good governance,” and once again the Party has found the right answer. The three professors Chen has gathered around him light up. “At last, we’re going to talk about the petitions office, the perfect solution of a good government in a complex society,” they think.

  These days, every administration has a petitions office where dissatisfied citizens can file petitions. The petitions are recorded in computers: China never ceases to amaze us! If a petitioner does not obtain satisfaction at a lower level, he can seek redress at a higher one—sending his petition, for instance, from the commune to the district or even to the city level. The professor of petitions, a certain Wang, suggests that his students do a training course at the petitions office. He himself spent six months at the Shanghai office, whereupon he concluded that 90 percent of the petitions were genuine. He also concluded that the Chinese “like their administration and the Communist Party.” How does he know? “If the citizens didn’t trust us, they wouldn’t come and complain to us.” I am dumbfounded.

  How many citizens dare to file petitions? How many petitions are registered and how many redressed? Now that the topic has come up, we might as well examine it thoroughly. Wang finds my questions excellent: they deserve to be studied “at length.” In fact, the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences has just published a study on the subject, finding that all the petitions are well-founded but that only 0.3 percent wind up redressed. Wang has not heard of this study. He doubts whether it is scientific, since it doesn’t correspond to his own experience. Do the cadres really undergo training at the petitions office, as he suggests? Unfortunately, they are “too busy,” Wang says.

  But we are getting lost in details. The main thing, says Chen, taking charge of the discussion once again, is that the Party has found the right ideological response to an obvious social issue: the Chinese are protesting more and more. Chen talks of the “important” and “spontaneous” demands of the people. I look skeptical. China has become a “society of citizens,” he tells me. “But the Party remains as strong as ever, because it has been able to adapt, thanks to the Three Represents and the petitions office.” Wang adds: “And because it has understood the changing nature of society, the Party will rule for a long time.”

  My interpreter, who translates this drivel word for word, is privately surprised to see me taking notes. I tell her later that the Party’s real thinking and the training that it imparts have less to do with content than with the incessant repetition of these circumlocutions. “Do they really believe what they say?” she asks me. The same question is asked of all totalitarian regimes. Though one joins the Party more out of ambition than out of conviction, once inside, one begins to think along sectarian lines and believe blindly, so thorough is the ideological brainwashing.

  “Do you have any other questions?” Chen’s tone suggests that it is time for me to leave. But I do have one more query: I want to know about human rights in China. Chen tries to play for time. We need to freshen up a bit. June in Shanghai is unbearably hot. We are given wet towels. We mop our faces and hands and rub our necks energetically.

  But Chen, aware of the European obsession with human rights, is ready for my question. He has an expert at hand. Master Yang introduces himself: he is a professor at the Party School, a lawyer, an expert on human rights, and an AIDS specialist. Yang represents China at all international forums where AIDS is discussed. China is not doing much to contain the disease, yet Yang always heads a large delegation whose very size precludes any criticism.

  “As you know,” begins Master Yang, convinced that Westerners are totally ignorant about China, “human rights have been enshrined in our Constitution.” This h
appened in 2004, to the great satisfaction of Western governments. But Yang says that this concession to European humanists did not cost the Communist Party anything.

  I ask whether a Chinese citizen who believes that his individual rights have been infringed upon can lodge a complaint at the petitions office. Can he cite the constitution in court? Yang observes that I know nothing about China. He will try to help me nonetheless. The constitution, in China, is the “mother of law,” yet it is too sacred to be invoked. What is its purpose, then? It “shows the way to legislators.” Do human rights form part of any other legal text that may be invoked? Not yet: “It is far too early.” China is in transition. I had forgotten about this universal justification for everything—including our credulity.

  In this room where visitors are received, there are Chen, Wang, Yang, and Deng, who has yet to utter a word. He is the youngest, about forty; the others are gray. His silence indicates that he is the school’s real boss, the Party secretary who keeps watch. It is the same in all institutions. Chen turns respectfully toward Deng and asks him to conclude. As a mark of deference to his elders, Deng assumes an air of false modesty, murmuring his inability to do so. I recognize the mannerisms of the chief, the same everywhere in China. There is no doubt: Deng is the secretary. He begins speaking. The others speak only Chinese, but Deng’s English is excellent. “You are loath to admit it,” he says, “but the Party has anticipated all your objections. We don’t need democracy because we are ahead of your democracy. The Party listens to the people and addresses all their concerns. Western-style democracy would mean going backward for China.”