by Guy Sorman
Taking up the conspiracy theory dear to sociologist Bourdieu, He Qing says that globalization is no accident. Capitalists with vested interests have imposed it on China. But don’t the Chinese also stand to gain from it? The gains are only material, and they accrue to the city dwellers at the expense of the peasantry. In comparison with this restricted material gain, the spiritual destruction is incalculable. Is China not making progress? He Qing rejects the Western notion of progress. Chinese civilization is based on harmony, not progress. Westerners introduced the notion of progress to China in the nineteenth century, making the Chinese ashamed of their so-called backwardness. Ever since, the Chinese elite has struggled to ape the West and catch up with it. This course will prove suicidal. If Chinese values are to be restored and China cured of her schizophrenia, it will have to abandon the Party’s materialistic ideology, not the Party itself. To China’s great misfortune, says a distressed He Qing, the Communist Party is progressive and materialistic. Its rejection of culture and spirituality makes it genuinely communist.
As the history of China can’t be rewritten, He Qing feels the least that can be done is halting its irrevocable march. He is actively advocating—through the force of his pen, nothing more—a more inward-looking China, based on its traditional values and the domestic market. How does he propose to achieve this? He rejects democracy, saying that the Chinese do not know what it means; their demands are not political but spiritual. What are the immutable Chinese values? He Qing identifies Chinese civilization with Confucian thought. Not unlike our Jesuit missionaries, he dismisses Daoism and Buddhism as superstitions. His attempt to reconstruct an ideal regime is even more astounding: there is no difference between his model and Maoist discourse. The peasantry, economic autonomy, and fierce national independence were its mainstays, though of course it paid only lip service to them. What Mao really wanted was to transform China into an industrial power, and to achieve this he was prepared to sacrifice the peasantry. He failed in his mission, but those who followed him succeeded. How could a scholar confuse Maoist mythology with the real history of Maoism?
Yet the confusion is common, not only among those nostalgic for the good old days but also among the so-called enlightened generation. The Chinese people see no contradiction between respect for collective values and the obligation to assume their individuality. It is the inability of the elite to come to terms with their own history that is the real cause of their schizophrenia. The Communist Party’s opposition to an honest appraisal of twentieth-century China can only add to the national schizophrenia. He Qing is quite right: schizophrenia is a painful condition for both the individual and the nation.
The last days of the Communist Party
China is like a movie out of sync. The soundtrack is the voice of the Communist Party telling us that all is well, that the nation is marching ahead, stable and harmonious. The pictures alternate among economic achievements, the affluence of the parvenus, and the poverty of the vast majority. “We are going through a phase of transition,” the soundtrack says, while we see images of hundreds of thousands of despairing peasants, worn-out migrants, workers out of jobs, the old and the infirm left by the wayside. This yawning gap between what is said and what actually happens has, in the past, led to the fall of the emperors. At the time of the Qin dynasty, the last to rule China, the court sought refuge in Confucian ritualism while the people were marching ahead into modernity. When in 1912, after 2,200 years of imperial rule, the Chinese got to elect their leaders for the first time in history, they voted for the Republican Party.
If the history of China has any lessons to offer, then the Party has cause for concern. Twenty-two centuries witnessed the fall of twenty-six dynasties, and each time the end was violent. The history of the Party has been no less brutal. Ever since it came to power, its leaders have constantly changed course, the series of about-faces reflective of internecine struggles within the Party. After the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and reform, has inner Party strife finally come to an end? Hasn’t the Party been consistent in its stands since 1979? This is not certain. Co-optation being the Party’s only mode of succession, there is always the possibility of factional conflicts. The Party has stayed on course, but the path that it has chosen has left the great majority unhappy. Within the Party, one faction, leftist, is hostile to economic liberalism; another, nationalist, opposes the Americanization of society. There is a permanent power struggle between the two. The Party has no room for compromise or dialogue. This is also true of the Party’s relations with the nation. Village elections and the petitions office, the only Party-authorized forums where people can vent their ire, are inadequate to cope with the demands of the majority. The Party is not prepared to listen and refuses to negotiate. A totalitarian monolith, it can’t move forward. It knows only how to repress, prohibit, and incarcerate. Power is in the barrel of a gun, said Mao Zedong in 1930. It still is.
The people and the Party are moving at two different speeds. Will economic growth be able to satisfy the people’s needs? In all likelihood, disparities will increase. Without the countervailing effect of democracy, the rich will become richer and the poor will have nothing left to lose. A single uncontrolled mutiny, a rumor of bankruptcy, a pandemic—and millions of Chinese will begin clamoring for the Party’s dismissal. How will the army react? Instead of one Tiananmen, will there be ten, twenty, or a hundred massacres in every city? Wei Jingsheng, the democrat exiled in Washington, predicts that the army won’t fire. Even in 1989, though the People’s Army obeyed the Party, the massacre of fellow citizens divided officers and soldiers alike. If a fresh revolt breaks out, the army could well break away from the regime. As Mao Zedong aptly put it: in a tyrannical regime, “if you don’t shoot, you’re dead!” When Gorbachev hesitated to give the order to shoot Baltic and German demonstrators, he signed the Soviet Union’s death warrant. The West neither foresaw nor analyzed that—and despite the precedent, it displays the same blindness toward China. As for France, which boasts the largest number of friends of the Communist Party, only our ideology can explain our affinity for despotism.
Sinomania: a French ideology
Chinese archives remain closed. Pictures are rare and films nonexistent. The great massacre of the Chinese in the twentieth century will remain invisible, unregistered in our collective conscience. So the French infatuation for China continues unabated. Once the diplomatic mourning for Tiananmen was over, successive French governments displayed the same admiration for the Communist Party as they did in the past for the Chinese emperor, hailing it for maintaining peace and ushering in a new era of prosperity. That social order has been imposed by a police state, and the fear of civil war hardly matters to the French leadership. In 1995, Alain Peyrefitte said that a vast nation like China could be ruled only with an iron hand. China as a confederation, which is what most Chinese democrats are proposing today, was inconceivable to him. When asked about democracy in China, former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who claims to be no mean sinologist, continued to raise political and cultural objections as late as 2005: “China is too big to organize elections”; “the polytheistic Chinese do not understand the meaning of individual freedom or democracy.”
Will the Canadians and the Brazilians stop voting because their countries are too big? Should the Indians, even more polytheistic than the Chinese, abandon democracy? Why does French diplomacy use the cultural-differences argument only in China’s case? It is unfair, our diplomats say, to impose human rights on the Chinese, because they are not like us. This policy of cultural relativism—China is wonderful but the Chinese are to be looked down upon—draws its inspiration from French sinology. For the last three hundred years, it has been harping on the timelessness of China.
The French sinologists Édouard Chavannes, Marcel Granet, Henri Maspero, Paul Demiéville, and Étienne Balazs produced an immense body of work on Chinese thought, which their students went on to study in a completely ahistorical manner. Scholars i
n French universities quibble over Pierre Ryckman’s (Simon Leys’) translation of Confucius, which he did in Australia, holding forth as if time had stood still and Confucius was a contemporary, not 2,500 years old. In 2005, François Jullien, a philosopher among sinologists and a sinologist among philosophers, wrote that to understand modern-day China, it was necessary to be acquainted with Confucianism as revealed by him. It is true that there can be no understanding France without some knowledge of Christianity—but somewhat far-fetched to say that we would be able understand modern-day France just by reading the Gospels. Similarly, Confucius’s Analects, adapted to suit all tastes, are by no means a compendium of modern-day China. Besides, why should the study of China be the sole prerogative of specialists in classical Chinese whose achievements, in any case, are unexceptional? Are we to infer that just by learning English and German, we can understand the United States and Germany?
Along with this academic sinology, however, there is a more recent school, guided by teachers and researchers such as Jacques Pimpaneau, Marie Holzman, and Jean-Luc Domenach, that makes a distinction between the museum China and the living China. Regrettably, this school does not enjoy the same kind of political and administrative backing as the other school, represented by influential spokesmen like Alain Peyrefitte. French diplomacy is, by and large, a reflection of classical sinology, because it has a vested interest in it: French mandarins are at ease with Chinese mandarins. The Gaullist tradition—from which French foreign-policy makers, leftists and rightists alike, have drawn inspiration for over fifty years—shows a marked preference for government-to-government dealing, tending to avoid thorny issues like human rights. Finally, the dominant cultural-diversity discourse has proved helpful in emphasizing the fundamental difference of the Chinese, while leaving to America the more distasteful task of defending universal values, such as democracy and human rights.
Luckily, more and more people are learning Chinese, and a new generation is viewing China from all angles: sociological, economic, demographic, environmental, and theological. China is ceasing to be the preserve of sinologists, though the Communist Party is doing its best to block factual research. Sinologists taken with Confucius will always be welcome, because they advance the cause of the authoritarian regime. By contrast, sociologists and economists looking to study conditions on the ground, especially if they become too curious, are not permitted to work in China and have to confine themselves to the periphery—Taiwan or Hong Kong. Journalists, in particular, are closely watched. If they are too explicit in their criticism of the regime and its atrocities, they are expelled. Apart from the pressure of the Chinese authorities, they also have to deal with the censorship of their own managements, which filter dispatches in order to placate China and safeguard short-sighted economic interests. It took the Dongzhou massacre in December of the Year of the Rooster for the French press to take note of China’s rebellions. Needless to say, political observers interested in Chinese human rights and democracy have a hard time getting visas. The purpose of the alliance between classical French sinology and the Chinese Communist Party is to project a certain image of China, rather than China as it really is.
While on an official visit to Beijing in 2005, the then-French president Jacques Chirac said, “In China, time flows more slowly than elsewhere.” This elegant formulation, which could be applied elsewhere, was music to the ears of sinologists and sinophiles, a legitimization of their defunct research. The Communist leadership was pleased, too. “Things take their own time in China” is how it explains away its own shortcomings. Deng Xiaoping said that it was too early to evaluate the results of the Communist Revolution. We are going through a phase of transition, the Communist cadres answer in chorus to anyone who dares to be critical. But the transition never seems to end. The endless willingness of Chinese Communists and French sinologists to wait bridges our own ideological divisions. The Left in France is not particularly concerned about human rights. The social realists are disciples of Henry Kissinger, who fears that Chinese elections would bring to power a nationalist party far more dangerous than the Communist Party—leading us to believe that the Communist Party is harmless. This is not true. It is dangerous to its own people, who live in fear; it is dangerous to the Tibetan and Uigur minorities that it has annexed; it is dangerous to its neighbors Taiwan, Korea, and Vietnam, on whom Beijing has made territorial claims. How can we say that a democratic government in China would pose a greater danger?
Are we to understand that in France, leftists and rightists both prefer enlightened despotism to democracy? Are we to assume that because they don’t have the right to democracy, the Chinese are different from us? If so, how? As for the transition, it has no meaning. The time will never come. What are we to say to a billion Chinese who have been living so long in a phase of transition in hope of “a thousand years of happiness”? Shall we tell them to come back later, for the time is not yet ripe?
That the French intelligentsia and political leaders persist in this ahistorical view of China is perplexing. What interests them is not the flesh-and-blood Chinese but a supposedly eternal Chinese ethos. China itself, it appears, will change faster than they will.
CHAPTER TEN
The Republicans
In Taiwan, a hothouse of all China’s cultures, it is customary to arrive early for an appointment and very early for a meal. Li Ang, however, is late. Li Ang has arranged our meeting in a noisy, crowded bar in the heart of Taipei. The atmosphere is suddenly lighter than in Beijing. It feels good to breathe the air of democracy. The Chinese here can talk publicly without the fear of arrest, and I can wait, secure in the knowledge that no one is following me. People who live in a democratic system tend to take their freedom for granted, not realizing how lucky they are not to have to think twice before speaking. A little deprivation is perhaps a good thing; only then do we realize the true value of freedom.
At last Li Ang appears. Slender, out of breath, her eyes red, her hair disheveled, she has come straight from a demonstration in support of Chinese lesbians. No, Li Ang does not have lesbian leanings; her novels and private life, equally tumultuous, are proof enough. Most Taiwanese women are fashion-conscious, but Li Ang looks as though she has dressed in a hurry. Her eyes are her striking feature, fiery with a lurking glimmer of irony. Her friend Wuer Kaixi, the Tiananmen student leader who has settled in Taiwan, has warned me, “She’ll eat you alive.”
Li Ang owes her reputation as a man-eater to her novel The Butcher’s Wife. Published in 1968, when she was twenty-five, the book won her instant acclaim. It tells the story of a peasant woman forced to marry a butcher with two passions: raping his wife and cutting up pigs at the village abattoir. He himself ends up like the pigs, dismembered by his own wife. Based on a small news item, the novel is her metaphor to describe women’s position in society. Would she write such a novel again? “Certainly not,” she says. “Democracy in Taiwan has freed politics and given women freedom, in fact and in law”; now they can vote and make their voices heard. “We have secured all our feminist demands,” she adds. But don’t Taiwanese husbands still keep a second wife without telling the first? They can’t afford it any more, she tells me laughingly. The hard-core bigamists have to go to the mainland for their home away from home. They use business as an excuse to set up a mistress who is easy on the pocket.
But the issue of lesbianism remains to be resolved. Male homosexuals dominate Taipei’s cultural life and cinema, but lesbians are still looked down upon. Ang has devoted her last book to them. She also demonstrates in front of newspaper offices and television stations, which shy from tackling the issue. “But I’m all alone,” she complains. Lesbians don’t dare come out in the open and join her protest, for fear of repercussions at home and at work.
A woman, free and Chinese
Is lesbianism the last of Li Ang’s crusades? Are we to understand that she has won her other battles? Undoubtedly, Chinese men and women cannot be freer than they are in Taiwan. They are free to sa
y what they want and take a stand on just about anything—except, of course, lesbianism. After Li Ang’s book, this, too, will no longer be taboo.
I tell Li Ang that many Europeans still believe that the Chinese, not predisposed to liberty, don’t know what individual freedom is. She is indignant: “Do we really have to prove to the world that we are human?” And she has a contention with European feminists, especially two of the movement’s leading lights: Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi and Julia Kristeva. The former, who enjoyed considerable moral stature in her time in France and Italy, saw in Mao’s China the hoped-for revolution that the Stalinists betrayed. In 1971, she wrote: “At last, we are witnessing the end of discrimination between material and intellectual labor, nothing short of full equality.” She called Mao a “genius” and viewed the Cultural Revolution as “ushering in a thousand years of happiness after three years of trouble.” Her book About China, in which she reproduced word for word the monotonous drivel of her Communist mentors, has faded into oblivion.
Kristeva, a psychoanalyst and writer of repute, thought that Mao’s China had found the true answer to the “eternal conflict” between the sexes. Madam Wang and Madam Zhao, the heroines of her book About Chinese Women, work in a factory by day and are artists by night. Their husbands are conveniently absent. Kristeva sees this as liberation, forgetting that the husbands are being reeducated in labor camps. First published by Éditions des Femmes, this book, too, would have been forgotten had Kristeva not allowed a reprint in 2001, without changing a single word. She says in the preface that nothing has changed. She herself “had not seen any violence” during her stay in China. She did not exclude the possibility of Mao’s China being totalitarian, but she left the task of denunciation to others. Her main concern was women’s liberation, which had made more progress in China than in Europe.
