China Witness

by Xinran Xue

  ***

  SECURITY MEN: You're not allowed to film here!

  XINRAN: Why?

  SECURITY MAN A: Have you got a permit?

  XINRAN: What permit? We've come to pay our respects to former generations, and to share the glory of those times… surely we don't need a permit?

  SECURITY MAN B: Why are you using a video camera?

  XINRAN: To record our feelings and what we have found out about the 4 May Movement.

  SECURITY MEN: It's not allowed. The rules say that the media can only film if they have permits.

  XINRAN: Whose rules?

  SECURITY MEN: The park administration. You're on our territory, you have to let us run it.

  XINRAN: Your Huangchenggen Park, is it one of the municipal parks open to the public? Does it come under the Beijing Municipal Administration? Is it public property protected by the law of the People's Republic of China? If it is, then why can't Chinese citizens find out about one of our own historical monuments? And can't foreigners film a monument on a main street commemorating Chinese history?

  SECURITY MAN A: We're not going to go into all that with you, you've got to show a permit, otherwise we'll call people to come and take you away!

  XINRAN: Take us away? Why? Did you know it's breaking the law to arrest innocent people? Who's in charge of you? We'll talk to him, because you don't have the most basic municipal administration rules to back you up. What you're doing is going to be evidence for world opinion that accuses China of having no legal system or human rights. You're damaging our image of democratic freedom. Who's your boss? Get him here, or I'll go and see him!

  SECURITY MAN A [pointing to B]: He's phoning the boss now.

  XINRAN: Thank you. I think your boss will see I'm right.

  SECURITY MAN B: The boss says he's too busy to come.

  XINRAN: Then I'll speak to him on the phone. Like you said, if we've contravened your administrative regulations, then that's his job and he has to take care of it. Kindly ring him again and tell him I have an important matter to discuss with him.

  ***

  I sounded so intransigent that Security Man B wasted no time in dialling again: "That woman insists on speaking to you!" he said.

  But he did not pass the phone to me – he gave it to A who listened, and listened, and listened. All at once, he went pale. When the call ended, I could see they did not know what to do. Obviously their boss knew something about "media connections" and their fearsomeness, and wanted nothing to do with us. The poor administrators standing before us only knew that their boss was "he who must be obeyed", and they had no way of relinquishing their responsibilities.

  At that moment I remembered the saying that "'face' is the lifeline of the Chinese poor". I did not want to make life too difficult for two almost uneducated young people, so I changed my tone:

  ***

  XINRAN: Soon 2008 will be here, and this park is one of the sights of Beijing. There will be more people than ever from China and abroad who want to come and see this monument to modern Chinese history, and nowadays most travellers bring video cameras. If we keep stopping them, then it will make us look ridiculous. Go back and tell your boss to bring your administrative statutes into line with Chinese law. Otherwise the people breaking the law will be you. Your boss can't send you out into the street and wash his hands of you. He has to help you clarify some basic international rights and laws, otherwise you may become the criminals in the development of Chinese civilisation. I'm not joking. If I'd been an overseas Chinese with a foreign passport and didn't understand your sense of responsibility and patriotism, this incident today might have become a huge joke, and made us a laughing stock for foreigners. Fancy needing a news permit to video a historical monument in a Chinese street. You would become proof that there is no freedom of speech in China! [Brief pause.] What exactly are your powers and responsibilities?

  SECURITY MEN [in unison]: We don't know.

  XINRAN: So what regulations do you follow to enforce public security?

  SECURITY MAN A: We've got documents, but I can't quote them to you.

  SECURITY MAN B: They're all very old, we haven't got the new ones yet. We can't tell you, but our boss knows.

  ***

  This was a typically Chinese answer: we don't know, our bosses know.

  Do these leaders know? If they do but don't get things clear for those under them, are they real leaders? I recalled a friend quoting an old saying and complaining about people who "out of their own ignorance, clarify things for other people". That's terrible, but bamboozling other people when one understands things clearly is even more terrible.

  At this point I want to quote the definition of a Chinese person taken from a British encyclopedia of 1842…

  A Chinaman is cold, cunning and distrustful; always ready to take advantage of those he has to deal with; extremely covetous and deceitful; quarrelsome, vindictive, but timid and dastardly. A Chinaman in office is a strange compound of insolence and meanness. All ranks and conditions have a total disregard for truth.

  How much has this image of "the Chinaman" changed in the last 150 years? I don't know – I can't even tell in my own lifetime.

  "I don't know" or "I've no idea" appears to be the usual response to the almost completely opposed life values expressed by our interviewees in explaining who they are, and by the sons and daughters trying to understand them. In fact, almost every Chinese person has been through the "I don't knows" and "I've no ideas" of the last hundred years. Even surviving archives of the great events of Chinese history and Chinese yearbooks differ in the way they present that history. One hundred years filled with too many wars with all the chaos and strife they bring in their wake, together with the failure of our national saviours, dramatic changes in our beliefs and confusion in moral standards, have led to a kind of "inflation and metamorphosis" both in the way Chinese people describe reality to themselves, and in the architecture of Chinese cities. In the search for their roots and for their self-respect as a nation, Chinese people have lost their way. The result is a historical map which lacks an agreed system of explanatory symbols and is forever being reprinted.

  Afterword

  Images of My Motherland

  It was hard for me to put down my pen and "finish" this book. As I wrote, I kept asking myself: Are my experiences and even what I write also part of those "things you can't say for sure"? The reality is just that: in all my interviewing, editing and tidying, I could not bridge the gap between the historical facts of that time and the gloss put on it by the people who came after them; I could not find any universally recognised standards of right and wrong in the last few generations of China's history; I could not figure out how to experience or express the delights and excitements of their childhood, the aspirations and pleasures of their adulthood and the joys of their old age. I had even wondered whether they had had any opportunities to experience "delights". The facts proved me wrong: our parents and grandparents had not only experienced "delights" that we can understand, they had the will and the ability to search for, be moved by and comprehend delight in the midst of dire poverty and things that "cannot be said for sure".

  I am in the process of searching for my heart's true motherland, among all the "can't say for sures" of several generations of Chinese.

  After I returned from my travels, I found myself unable to escape the stories in the books; unable to escape the voices of those interviewees; unable to escape my country as it revealed itself to me in the cracks between the layers of history… I spent six months laboriously selecting, rejecting and editing 800,000 characters' worth of research, interviews and recordings into 300,000 Chinese characters. Every day I found myself in a state of emotional turmoil; it was often very hard to find textual proofs in historical sources to explain what the interviewees had experienced, for theirs was a time of history which even now has not been completed, a time which nobody can explain, much less fully document.

  When after those six months I ret
urned to my friends and appeared in public once more, many of my acquaintances were startled: "Xinran, what's happened to you? Where did all those white hairs come from?" I replied: "I got all those white hairs from months skulking at home!" But I knew that they were the sprouts of "bitter thoughts and remembrances" in my heart. The cares weighing on the hearts of the old people I had interviewed had led me to ponder deeply on the last century of China's history, and had drawn me into the arduous journey towards understanding modern China.

  On this journey I met over a hundred Chinese university students who lent me their support, acting as my assistants, doing research, word processing, selecting and editing extracts. They began to develop an interest just like mine, an intense curiosity about the nature of the cultural system and historic earth our modern-day life is rooted in. Why have we not paid proper attention to the history that is right next to us, which is disappearing as our lives and even our streets are transformed in front of our eyes? The stories of our grandfathers and grandmothers are doors that will close and be destroyed one day soon: how many of them have been passed on to their children and grandchildren?

  In fact, the reactions of the university students were more powerful than those of my own – their parents' – generation. First, there was the gulf of language between them. The old people's variety of different accents caused considerable embarrassment for some of the university students who came from the same part of the world – "You're from the same place, and you can't understand what that person was saying?" The scenes and objects that appeared in these narratives, things that had disappeared never to return, made life very hard for these bright students from the best universities: "I don't know how to write this word, or what that thing's for…"

  Then there was the confusion surrounding common historical knowledge. The great joys and sorrows of the old people who had been forced together into their shared historical experiences astonished and shocked those university students, whose own historical education had been delivered in disconnected fragments, misinterpreted or overlooked: "How come we didn't know about these things?" Some of them could not even spell the names of the famous men who had ruled China and been the driving force behind major historical events… The old people's aspirations and sacrifice, their pure hearts and lack of personal ambition, caused the university students to ask suspiciously again and again: "How could they have invested so much faith in a political party which had no economic knowledge and no understanding of human nature?"

  Another typical response from the university students was an examination of their own consciences. As one of them said: "Our own parents and grandparents have survived this time; do they have stories like these as well? Why haven't they told them to us? Once I know their stories, how will I judge their past? Will I still be proud of my widely read grandfather and my kindly, skilled grandmother?"

  It is my belief that pain and questions are an overture to social progress.

  In April 2007 I returned to China, for further confirmation of my experiences of a nation that was "changing and modernising with every passing day" so that I would have another chance to come to understand the disappearing older generations of Chinese.

  After almost four weeks of revisits to Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and small villages on the edges of the big cities, and further meetings with people I had interviewed, I was left with even more, even newer "things that I couldn't say for sure". Many different images of those old people's former battles and hopes, images that seemed almost impossible to reconcile with each other, were spinning before my eyes and jostling in my thoughts:

  – A shopping street in a modern metropolis: men dressed in Western brand-name suits and women in evening gowns were wandering about in couples in the sunlight, shopping or simply taking a stroll. Countless envious eyes were following their progress; most of those eyes were set in faces that still bore the scars of hard labour in the fields, and in bodies carved by the years.

  – A roadside snack stall in a small village: most of the men were talking business, and the women were all discussing their children's education; but the students were all talking about how to impress people with Korean hairstyles, how to play Japanese computer games, or how to go to the city to find the jobs that made big money.

  – Vendors crying their wares in a tourist spot: a string of three small monkeys and a Buddha statue decorated with little flashing lights, which the vendor calls "the quest of today's Chinese". Those three monkeys were said to be a folk understanding of Jiang Zemin's "Three Represents" policy. The "Three Represents" is usually summarised as: The Communist Party of China represents the requirements of China's advanced productive forces, the progressive course of China's advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese masses. One of the three monkeys on the string was covering its eyes with both hands – don't see; one was covering its ears with both hands – don't hear; one was covering its mouth – don't speak. The seller explained to the tourists that this was the "wise" way for Chinese people to deal with Party leaders: look without seeing; turn a deaf ear; watch but don't say anything. But wisest of all was to be like the Buddha seated in the petals of a lotus – purge your mind of desire and ambition.

  – A little bookshop in a small town: bursting with "big bargain" books, "stock-clearance crazy prices" CDs and "guaranteed genuine promotional offer" DVDs. They had everything you could ever want, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, so cheap that only a fool would not buy them, even more elegantly printed and bound than those in the big state-run Xinhua bookshop. On impulse I bought over thirty volumes, hoping to catch up on my "modern Chinese current affairs literature". One of the books was called China's Twentieth-Century Disasters, which recorded fifteen floods along China's five major waterways, five major famines in the densely populated eastern region, four major earthquakes along the eastern seaboard and many droughts and fires, all between 1910 and 1998. Were they acts of God, or were they man-made, political disasters? The book gave no comment or analysis, merely stating that in each case over 10,000 lives had been lost. I sighed inwardly: this nation had suffered so much from faction-fighting and warlords, and the common people had had to endure so many viciously cruel natural disasters as well. However, this is a nation "that wild fire can never burn, which rises again when the spring wind blows": 1.3 billion people had survived all the disasters and hardships of the century!

  – Magazines: of all the publications in China, these are by far the fastest growing area. The major newspapers are still half official political articles, half advertising; the smaller local papers seem to have more of an "eye for the money", and have more advertisements than anything else, with the rest made up of sensational or novelty stories, and just a sprinkling of major national current affairs stories and Party news. It is very hard to understand some of the things these advertisements are offering, often in a rather peremptory manner, such as "international luxury leisure home living is the first choice for Chinese people", "if you're looking for somewhere to live, live like a tycoon", "life without a luxury house or big-brand car is not really living", and so on… In a mere twenty years of reform, can 1.3 billion Chinese people walk into an "international luxury life" with a single step? And does this mean that all those peasants who earn less than a hundred yuan a year are "not really living"? Is the journey from extreme socialism to extreme capitalism our only possible route to "a strong nation and a wealthy people"?

  – On Chinese television: the country has dozens of television channels, and on all of them peak time is dominated by beauty contests, talent competitions, historical costume dramas, lectures on history by big-name historians and other such programmes. News programmes remain dominated by interminable seas of meetings and still noticeably lack current affairs analysis. This is clearly a very sensitive area: in China, the further away something is in space and time, the safer it is for the media. Sometimes it seems that every Chinese is a nutrition expert or a gourmet: these are safe topi
cs that have neither been made risky by government or dynastic changes, nor dragged into conflicts of personalities. Radio seems a little braver than television: once-forbidden areas such as sex, an independent legal system, freedom of the press, religion and so on, all "briefly and evasively" show their faces in public; some have even become the "trademark themes" of smaller local stations. But limited international knowledge leads many presenters to express highly ludicrous attitudes, such as "only the ultimate world-quality Starbucks coffee can give the experience of true white-collar pride", "all stars of international fashionable society crave a beautiful white skin", "the USA is the cultural centre of the modern world", "every single day, all the people in the world are watching China's development", and so on and so forth. I once heard an old man phone the presenter of a radio hotline: "Mr Presenter, can you talk about what the foreigners admire about us now?"

  – The internet and blogs: the only places where Chinese people can express themselves fully and without reserve. I have seen Chinese people's search for and defence of their roots, as well as their eagerness to pass on the inheritance of China's culture. The increasing popularity of the Internet has been a true "cultural revolution" in Chinese society, completely remaking the old system that had lasted for millennia, where words could only travel from the top of society to the bottom in a one-way stream: Chinese people can now say whatever is on their minds without fear. To China's Internet users, the Net is not only a platform for speech, it is also a space of safety and liberation: people who suspect the gods, who question the government, who rebel against their parents, who oppose their superiors, even those who grumble about their spouses or have harsh things to say about their friends and family, whose views would once have been viewed as "rebelling against authority", "behaving inappropriately" and "betraying their own family", can let off steam here, with never a soul the wiser, not even the gods themselves. Now every town and tiny village that has electricity also has Internet cafés and bars, so full that it has become a problem, as old and young alike become addicted to the Internet. Rumour has it that a new "hot topic" among many women is how to retrieve husbands and children from the Internet café for food and sleep.