Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: Chinese Whispers

  PART I: THE EXILES

  Chapter 1: Exile from Tiananmen Square

  Chapter 2: Waiting for the Messiah

  Chapter 3: Stars of Arizona

  Chapter 4: Mr. Wei Goes to Washington

  Chapter 5: China in Cyberspace

  PART II: GREATER CHINA

  Chapter 1: Chinese Disneyland

  Chapter 2: Not China

  Chapter 3: The Last Colony

  PART III: THE MOTHERLAND

  Chapter 1: Frontier Zones

  Chapter 2: Roads to Bethlehem

  Chapter 3: The View from Lhasa

  Chapter 4: A Deer Is a Deer

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary of Names

  Notes

  About the Author

  Other Books by Ian Buruma

  Copyright

  For R. V. Schipper

  . . . “Is there one single maxim that could ruin a country?”

  Confucius replied: “Mere words could not achieve this. There is a saying, however: ‘The only pleasure of being a prince is never having to suffer contradiction.’ If you are right and no one contradicts you, that’s fine; but if you are wrong and no one contradicts you—is this not a case of ‘one single maxim that could ruin a country’?”

  The Analects of Confucius

  Translation by Simon Leys

  Introduction:

  Chinese Whispers

  Strange things happen when Chinese dynasties near their end. Dams break, earthquakes hit, clouds appear in the shape of weird beasts, rain falls in odd colors, and insects infest the countryside. These are the ill omens of moral turpitude and political collapse. While greed and cynicism poison the society from within, barbarians stir restlessly at the gates. Corrupt officials, whose authority can no longer rely on the assumption of superior virtue, exercise their power with anxious and arbitrary brutality. When people, even those who live far from the centers of power, begin to sense that the Mandate of Heaven is slipping away from their corrupted rulers, rebellious spirits press their claims as the saviors of China, with promises of moral restoration and national unity. Millenarian cults and secret societies proliferate and sometimes explode in massive violence.

  At the end of the Han dynasty, in the second century, a faith-healing sect named the Yellow Turbans caused havoc. Their leader, a Taoist priest, promised to lead his followers to “the Way of Great Peace” (Taiping Dao), and although he was killed in 184 A.D., the rebellion of the Yellow Turbans took more than twenty years to put down.

  The end of the Mongol Yuan dynasty, in the fourteenth century, came after a rash of local rebellions. One of them was staged by a secret society called the White Lotus, whose folk-Buddhist leaders issued dark warnings of an imminent apocalypse. The apocalyptic theme was later picked up by another peasant messiah, a martial arts master and herbal healer named Wang Lun, who rebelled against the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1900, a martial arts sect known in the West as the Boxers rose, convinced that a sacred spirit made them impervious to foreign bullets. They were wrong and died in large numbers.

  The Qing was finally brought down in 1911, about fifty years after a frustrated scholar called Hong Xiuquan unleashed his Taiping army to establish God’s Heavenly Kingdom in China. He claimed to be a brother of Jesus Christ. He denounced the Manchus as agents of Satan. His crusade left 20 million dead.

  Mao Zedong fitted quite neatly in this long line of peasant messiahs. Like his predecessors, he led a rural revolt to expel the barbarians, punish evildoers, and unite the empire. He abhorred superstitution, but his version of “scientific socialism” would reach the same degree of religious frenzy as Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom.

  Many people in China felt that the Mandate of Heaven had slipped from the Communist Party in the summer of 1989. Once the terrified rulers had sent in tanks to crush unarmed citizens, they had lost their claim to superior virtue. Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, which had replaced Confucianism as the official dogma and system of ethics, could no longer captivate minds, even in the Party itself. The rigid puritanism of Mao’s age had made way for the heady amorality and wild corruption of China’s new capitalism. And at the end of the millennium, a new millenarian cult had arrived, led by yet another faith-healing messiah. Most followers of Falun Gong were harmless elderly folk trying to preserve their good health through breathing exercises. Yet the government behaved as if another revolution were at hand.

  Strange flowers bloom in the People’s Republic of China. They also bloom in Taiwan, the United States, Hong Kong, and Singapore. But in a dictatorial one-party state, religion fills the gaps left by the absence of secular politics. That is why meditators, tree huggers, heavy breathers, or Evangelical Christians can suddenly find themselves blown up into dangerous counterrevolutionaries. In China, every believer in an unorthodox faith is a potential dissident, whether he knows it or not. When the right to rule is justified by dogma, a moral code, a controlling worldview, and the fatherly wisdom of leaders blessed with superhuman virtue, any alternative dogma existing outside the control of the great and virtuous leaders will be seen as a mortal threat.

  I believe that Communist Party rule will end in China; sooner or later all dynasties do. But when or how, I cannot say. Will one authoritarian dynasty be replaced, once again, by another, in the name of national unity and superior virtue? Or will the Chinese finally be able to govern themselves in a freer and more open society? The example of Taiwan, whose citizens can now speak freely and elect their own government, shows that it is possible. The example of Singapore, which combines relative economic liberalism with political authoritarianism, points in another, equally plausible, direction.

  It was with these questions in mind that I traveled through the Chinese-speaking world between 1996 and 2001—from the diaspora of exiles in the West, to Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China. During these years, I witnessed the “handover” of Hong Kong, the first free presidential election in Taiwan, and the beginning of the Falun Gong demonstrations in China. I saw a great deal of vitality—even optimism—on the way, especially in the economic sphere, in China no less than in Singapore or Hong Kong. But there were constant rumblings, too, a kind of background noise of angry people thrown out of work in newly privatized factories, of farmers being squeezed for money by corrupt officials, of religious believers being punished for exercising their faith in public. There was an unmistakable stink of political, social, and moral decay in the People’s Republic, the smell of a dynasty at the end of its tether.

  How to describe the problem of China, with its perpetual seesaws between enforced unity, order, and moral orthodoxy on the one hand and violent religious and political mutinies on the other? It had haunted me since that summer of 1989, when so many Europeans regained their liberties while Chinese failed in their attempt to gain theirs. Perhaps I should start with three stories about walls, metaphorical and real.

  In the beginning there were many walls—often little more than small fortified humps in the northern plains—which separated settled Chinese states from the barbarian nomads. But legend has it that in the third century B.C., slaves of the wicked Qin emperor pulled the various walls together to form one Great Wall. The Qin emperor was the first monarch to turn several states into one. China really began with him. The Western term for China is named after his state. We don’t actually know much about the Qin emperor. But he has gone down in history as the first great dictator, the pinnacle of a new cosmic order, who killed his critics and made bonfires of their books. Mao Zedong, a keen amateur historian, admired him greatl
y.

  The Great Wall was never very effective in keeping out belligerent barbarians, and there are few remaining traces of the Qin. Much of the wall was built only in the sixteenth century, and even those parts are crumbling. It is more as an idea, or a symbol, that the Great Wall cast a lasting spell. First it was a symbol of China’s isolation and its rulers’ wish to control an enclosed, secretive, autarchic universe, a walled kingdom in the middle of the world1. The Great Wall was seen as an expression of the Qin emperor’s dream of controlling everything and everyone in his empire. He wished to rule not only over his subjects’ bodies but also over their thoughts. The Great Wall, replicated in smaller city walls all over China—and within those city walls in even smaller walls, encircling private family compounds—stands for protection as well as oppression. One implies the other: You are controlled for your own protection; a giant prison is built for the safety of its inmates. An author from Hong Kong once wrote2: “There are numerous walls within the Chinese world; the Great Wall itself merely protects the Chinese against Devils from without.”

  The notion of protecting China, or Chineseness, has a long history. Chinese rebels against the Mongol rulers of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) and against the Manchus of the Qing (1662–1911) claimed to be saving Chinese civilization from the barbarians. But the Manchu emperors, too, justified their rule by acting as the self-appointed protectors of Chinese civilization; after all, they claimed to have restored order and virtue and to have unified the empire after the chaos of the late Ming dynasty. The same symbols recur in Chinese history, but their meanings can shift with time. From having been for centuries a symbol of tyranny, the Great Wall after the late nineteenth century became a positive symbol of Chinese achievement, national unity, and cultural security. France had its Eiffel Tower, and the British had their houses of Parliament; China had its Great Wall.

  The dream of Chinese unity behind the protective stones of the Great Wall has not faded. The “homecoming” of Hong Kong in 1997 was celebrated by a massive ballet performance in Beijing featuring, among other set pieces, a Great Wall constructed from an army of drilled Chinese bodies, glistening with the sweat of their exertions. Large drums were thumped. Massive choruses rejoiced: The compatriots of Hong Kong were safely back inside the gates, under the protection and control of the Qin emperor’s political descendants. How the Hong Kong Chinese themselves felt about this blessing was not considered to be relevant.

  In 1978 and 1979, however, another kind of wall had suddenly come into public view. It was made of gray brick, stood long and low in the center of Beijing, and was nothing much to look at, certainly not a tourist attraction. Mao Zedong had died two years earlier. After decades of total government control, a political thaw of sorts had set in, and the low wall in Beijing was quickly covered in poems, posters, letters, and proclamations, which often voiced complaints about abusive officials. In those giddy days of transition from Maoism to Deng Xiaoping’s authoritarian semi-capitalism, or “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” that unpretentious wall in Beijing was almost the only forum of free public debate in China. And it was there that a little-known electrician and underground magazine editor pinned up his poster about the “Fifth Modernization” and signed it with his name: Wei Jingsheng. Deng had announced four modernizations: in agriculture, science, technology, and national defense. Wei added democracy, without which, he wrote, “the four others are nothing more than a newfangled lie.”

  It was an extraordinary thing to have done. Wei said what many Chinese thought. But to do so in public was an act of extreme bravery, and to put his own name to it was foolhardy. He had gone against the orthodoxy of the state and openly criticized its supreme ruler. He lived under a dictatorship but behaved as if he were free. As most Chinese would have expected, the hand of authority came down hard, on Wei himself and on the so-called Democracy Wall movement. Wei would spend the next sixteen years in jail, much of the time in solitary confinement, tormented to the point of madness, but never broken. The Democracy Wall movement became part of a silent history, suppressed by the government but kept alive among Chinese in exile. The wall itself was torn down, to make way for a branch of the Bank of China and a glass-paneled display promoting China’s economic progress under the benevolent guidance of Deng Xiao-ping.

  There is also a third wall, fictional, the wall of a prison cell. It was described by a brilliant novelist, Han Shaogong. Like many Chinese intellectuals, Han was forced to “go down” to a remote rural area after the Cultural Revolution. He spent the 1970s tilling the fields in a small Hunanese village. Out of this experience came an extraordinary novel, Maqiao Dictionary, which is a kind of spoof anthropological dissection of village life through the language of its people. Each chapter is inspired by a slang expression. One of these is “democracy cell.”

  The story is told by a local gambler, whom Han springs from jail by paying his fine. Dressed in rags, his hair matted with lice, the gambler stinks so badly that Han makes him take a bath before hearing his story. Refreshed, the man starts to whine. He had been really unlucky this time.

  Unlucky?

  Yes, this time he had experienced the worst: a democracy cell.

  A democracy cell?

  Well, says the man, it’s like this: In most prisons, every cell has a boss and a hierarchy of henchmen. The boss gets to eat the best food and the best spot to sleep, and when he wishes to peep at the female prisoners through a tiny window in the wall, his cellmates must prop him up, sometimes for hours, until they buckle under the strain. But, hard though it may be, at least there is order. Every man gets his food. You have time to wash your face and to piss. You might even get some rest. Such an arrangement is better than a democracy cell. Democracy is what you get when there is no cell boss. The men fight one another like savages. They all want to be boss. Unity breaks down. Gangs go to war: Cantonese against Sichuanese, northeasterners against Shanghainese. There is no chance of getting sleep. You can’t wash. You get lousy in no time, people are injured, and sometimes even killed.

  This vignette of rural prison life is a perfect illustration of a common Chinese attitude toward democracy, or indeed political freedom. Many Chinese—and not just the rulers—associate democracy with violence and disorder. Only a big boss can make sure the common people get their food and rest. Only the equivalent of an emperor can keep the walled kingdom together. Without him, the Chinese empire will fall apart: region will fight region, and warlord will fight warlord. These assumptions rest on thousands of years of authoritarian rule, beginning with the first Qin emperor and his cursed Great Wall. And they are faithfully repeated by many in the West who presume to understand China.

  This is what Deng Xiaoping is alleged to have feared in 1989, when he decided to take harsh measures to stop the student demonstrations. Meeting at his walled compound with the standing committee of the Politburo, Deng said3: “Of course we want to build socialist democracy, but we can’t possibly do it in a hurry, and still less do we want that Western-style stuff. If our one billion people jumped into multiparty elections, we’d get chaos like the ‘all-out civil war’ we saw during the Cultural Revolution.”

  “That Western-style stuff.” It is a recurring theme in China, and other autocracies outside the Western world, the assumption that only Europeans and Americans should have the benefit of democratic institutions. It is of course a theme running through European colonial history, too. But if China has a history of despots ruling over the great Chinese empire, it also has a history of schisms and disorder and disunity, of rebellions, and of brave, mad, and foolhardy men and women who defied the orthodoxy of their given rulers. Of course rebels are not necessarily democrats. But dismissing democracy as “Western-style stuff” would consign 1 billion Chinese to political subservience forever. That is why I approach the Chinese-speaking world in this book through the rebels, the dissidents, the awkward squad that resists authoritarianism. What is their idea of freedom? Or of China? What does dissidence mean in a Chi
nese society? What makes people try, against all the odds, to defy their rulers? What chance do they have of succeeding? Will those virtual walls that make China the largest remaining dictatorship on earth ever come down?

  When I studied Chinese at university in the early 1970s, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, China was mostly an abstraction, as remote and physically inaccessible as the distant past. You could not go and see China with your own eyes unless you joined an organized tour of “Friends of the Chinese People” or a rigidly supervised scholarship program. For most of us, then, looking at China was an exercise in philology or semiology: You examined the official texts for subtle shifts of tone in Party propaganda, and for added information, you scrutinized photographs to observe who was sitting where at what state banquet. This kind of thing never appealed to me. I had no interest in trying to decipher the intrigues inside Mao’s court by catching the tiny rays of light that sometimes penetrated the Chinese wall. I was never a China watcher.

  Yet I remained preoccupied with China, for the same reasons that I have been interested in Germany and Japan. Chinese, like Japanese and Germans—and most other peoples in fact, though not always with similar dire consequences—carry a heavy load of national mythology. Yet while Chinese have no trouble identifying themselves with China, they are often hard-pressed to explain what they mean by that. Modern Chinese nationalism, like all forms of mystical nationalism, is based on a myth—the myth of “China” itself, which rests on a confusion of culture and race. Again and again, Chinese have sacrificed themselves and others for the sake of this myth, as abstract in its way as the China we studied in the early 1970s.

  During the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, a man named Lim Ken-han caused an astonishing fuss. Lim was the conductor of the Hong Kong China Philharmonic orchestra, which prided itself on being “100 percent Chinese,” unlike the Hong Kong Philharmonic, which contained musicians of various nationalities. Lim was furious when the latter was invited to play at the patriotic handover festivities, instead of his own orchestra, which was, in his words, “racially more suited.” What, apart from hurt professional pride, was the source of his fury? Lim was not a Communist. He was born in the Dutch East Indies, educated in Amsterdam, and went to live in China only in 1952, to help rebuild the motherland. Like so many other patriots from overseas, Lim became a victim of the Cultural Revolution. His sin was to have claimed that Western composers were worth hearing, even in China. Before he escaped to the relative freedom of Hong Kong, Lim’s patriotism was rejected in a horrible manner. For five years he was forced to clean toilets. Yet here he was in a rage because he was unable to express his love for China, or “China,” with his “100 percent Chinese” orchestra.