Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  And now he had married the daughter of a wealthy Taiwanese businessman and worked as a late-night radio disc jockey in Taichung. We met in an American-style hamburger joint. A lachrymose Taiwanese pop song was playing softly. Wu’er ordered a club sandwich. A gray T-shirt was stretched tight over his round stomach. His face had filled out, giving him the look of a dark cherub with soulful round eyes and pouting red lips. He fiddled with a cell phone. A U.S. senator was coming to Taipei and Wu’er was expecting a dinner invitation to come through at any minute. The prospect made him fidgety. The invitation never came.

  Despite his sleek and somewhat pampered exterior, Wu’er still has the charm of a born schmoozer, a man who likes to move in public. You could see why the crowds in Beijing listened to him from the moment he clambered on top of a wall and told them to resist the dictators. Wu’er is funny and expansive. He speaks the same almost-perfect American English as Chai Ling and Li Lu: “Those first three or four years in the U.S.? Gee, I should have been put away in an institution.” He had been overwhelmed by the experience of exile, of living in a free society. He had needed at least four years to calm down, just to think straight. The greatest problem, he said, was how to cope with disappointed idealism.

  Wu’er is a Uighur, the Muslim minority in the far west of China. He looks Levantine more than Chinese. Although his father was a staunch Communist cadre, the family didn’t eat pork, and something of the Muslim ethos had survived. Wu’er grew up with a strong sense of right and wrong, he explained, so unlike the Han Chinese, whose values are collectivist, not individual, and that, he continued, is why they lie quite happily to preserve harmony and “face.” The idealism Wu’er, or, as he put it, “the Tiananmen generation” grew up with was the last gasp of Maoism. When he was eight, his head was filled with Maoism. But the death of Mao, the arrest of his wife, Jiang Qing, and her cohorts—the Gang of Four—and the opening up of China to the West put an end to all that. Instead, people were encouraged by the new leader, Deng Xiaoping, to get rich quick. Corruption and crime soared. Wu’er: “What we had been taught went against everything we saw with our own eyes.” The official rhetoric swung wildly and the wooden phrases of authority almost never matched reality. The realization that they had been lied to, almost universally recognized among intelligent Chinese, fueled the Tiananmen generation’s rebellious spirit. But their hatred of authority was mixed, in Wu’er’s view, with an “old Chinese intellectual tradition of being responsible for the nation. We thought we could save China.”

  The massacre on June 4 put an end to that dream as well. As a result, Wu’er explained, people buried their disillusion under a thick crust of cynicism. “It is hard to kill idealism,” he said. “But Uncle Sam helped by rewarding extreme pragmatism. The green card is the best way to kill idealism.”

  I had heard it before, and not just from Chinese: the lack of deep meaning in Western life, the emptiness of American materialism, and so on. Spirituality, or the lack of it, and moral values, or the lack of them, were clearly problems that exercised Wu’er. In his talk, spirituality, idealism, and politics overlapped; they merged into a kind adolescent angst, as they often had in 1989, when Wu’er stood up in the Square, in his jeans and his cowboy boots, an adoring girl usually at hand, and announced that he was not interested in politics but was really an artist. His politics became a form of self-assertion, sometimes expressed in snatches of favorite rock-and-roll lyrics. “I love myself,” went one of his lines, “so I say I’m good and I deserve to be happy. I want to live for me. I’m Wu’er Kaixi, not someone else.” This was a long way from Maoist idealism. And yet in his comments about Taiwan he could sound almost like a Maoist.

  Wu’er pointed out the window of the hamburger joint. “Look at that,” he said. I looked, and saw two young girls walking by in miniskirts and T-shirts that left their midriffs bare. “Look at that,” he repeated, while looking intently. “You can see everything.” The indignation seemed genuine, even though it came from him, the old playboy of the Western world. Just think, he said: Taiwanese girls, “as young as sixteen,” who worked in bars and took money for sex, to buy clothes with fashionable brand names. He shook his head as though he couldn’t believe it.

  The Taiwanese were the luckiest Chinese, he said. They were free. Yet all this had ended in “a collapse of moral values.” Uighur morality, on the other hand, was similar to Christianity. Western philosophy, he said, was based on individualism. And so was Islam. But the Chinese—and here he spoke as if they were foreigners to him—didn’t think in terms of good and bad on an individual basis. They still had to learn individualism. Not that Wu’er had ever thought of these things much in China: “I developed these ideas after those crazy years in America.” And now that he had found himself as a “media person,” he wanted to implement those ideas in China. He would revive the idealism of 1989. He wanted to “dream big,” work for press freedom, build a “lively civil society.” He would have his own radio show in China. No, bigger than that—he would build his own “media empire.”

  Saving China is an old Confucianist project. The China to be saved is often a utopian ideal, defined by cultural rather than geographical borders. Rulers are supposed to be men of superior virtue. If such virtues are lacking in public life, it is the moral duty of gentleman-scholars to restore them. Even without knowing much about the tradition, the former student leaders claim to have been influenced by it, just as their revolutionary parents were. For example, Chai Ling’s former deputy, Li Lu, told me: “We thought we could save China because we were educated. It is laughable but also admirable. Like my father, we were typical Confucianists.”

  Unlike Wu’er, Li Lu comes from a family of intellectuals. His grandfather wrote a thesis at Columbia University in the 1920s, comparing Confucian philosophy with the liberal ideas of John Dewey. An advocate of individual liberty, he died in prison during the Cultural Revolution. Li Lu’s father studied science in the Soviet Union and was a good Communist dedicated to the revolution that would save China. But he too was imprisoned for many years in labor camps for being a class enemy. And yet he still tells his son in New York “to be Chinese, to help China, and not be fooled by a foreign country.”

  Chai Ling has been given to grand statements about saving China as well. At the same time, she describes her American exile as a release, a liberation from that burden. The details of her escape from China in 1990 are still mysterious. She simply arrived in Hong Kong by train one day. There are stories of plastic surgery to disguise her famous face and of help from gangsters, peasants, and even policemen on the way, of being smuggled out in a sealed crate; but none of this is certain. Chai herself has kept her silence. But she told me about her early years of exile, when she lived in Princeton in virtual seclusion. She told me how hard it was to be treated as an icon, when all she wanted was “closure.” After Tiananmen, she said, “we were forced to become something we didn’t want and do something we couldn’t do—find a solution to the ancient problems of China.” All she really wanted was to “struggle to be the person I want to be.” And it didn’t take much struggle to find she was “a born entrepreneur.”

  While I listened to Chai telling me this happy news in Cambridge, images of a different Chai passed through my mind: Chai holding forth about the future of China on U.S. television shows, Chai talking about being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, Chai posing as the Goddess of Democracy in New York in 1992, to protest against the visit of Premier Li Peng. And yet I believed her when she said she found it liberating to learn English, to talk to Americans, and to walk around Cambridge and Boston buying clothes, “hanging out,” doing what she felt like doing. The propensity to use touchy-feely language about finding oneself, which she shares with Li Lu and Wu’er Kaixi, is not a new affectation picked up in the process of being Americanized; it was already part of the Tiananmen generation. Mixed in with the rhetoric about democratic rights and romantic Chinese patriotism were strong, often barely coherent echoes of Europe
an, Japanese, and American revolts in 1968: “l’imagination au pouvoir,” sex and rock ’n’ roll, “My G-g-g-generation!” The boasting and the braggadocio—Wu’er Kaixi’s claims in 1989 that he was better than Lech Wałesa and comparable to Gandhi, or Li Lu’s later assertions that the Tiananmen students had lit the fuse that destroyed the Soviet empire—were part of their callow individualism. They wanted to be free to choose their own lives, unmolested by the collectivist pressures of Chinese society and the corruption of China’s oppressive politics. Most were already touched by America long before they got there.

  The daughter of doctors in Shandong province, Chai Ling had a hard but not untypical childhood for someone of her class and time. She was often left alone to take care of her brother and sister when her parents were ordered to tend to peasants in remote villages. She developed an early aversion to politics, for all too often politics meant being forced to take part in campaigns that were sometimes plainly mad and almost always humiliating. Politics was the reason she was so frequently left alone with her siblings. Life became easier after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, which is Chai’s earliest political memory. Teachers told her to cry, but she felt like laughing instead. She has little recollection of the Democracy Wall movement, which began two years later with Wei Jingsheng. With few exceptions, the students of 1989, who had grown up under Deng Xiaoping’s slogan “To Get Rich Is Glorious,” had barely heard of Wei. That was a different time—and a very different generation.

  Chai was an undergraduate at Beijing University, where, she says, “we all had the American dream.” I asked her what that meant. She said: “The America of cowboy movies, where people work their butts off and succeed. I always wanted to come to America. In fact, I was applying for a place at an American school in 1989 when the demonstrations began.” The land where people “work their butts off.” It was the second time in our conversation she had used that expression. Perhaps you have to grow up in a Communist society, where trying to get ahead through hard work is more often a recipe for trouble than success, to understand that working your butt off can be a form of freedom. From what Chai told me, however, the glimmering of a peculiar American dream, one that combined ambition with a kind of sentimental hubris, came to her as something stranger than cowboy movies: Chai’s adolescent dream was to have a television show for parents and children, then to build a theme park and “merchandise” the clothes and toys. Walt Disney was her hero: “He had a passion and made it come true.” That was the kind of passion, she says, that went into the Tiananmen Movement.

  Disneyland fantasies and starving to save China struck me as an odd combination. But Chai assured me that the hunger strike, too, was all about the love of life. The students loved life so much that they were willing to give it up for others. It was absolutely “sincere,” not just a matter of political tactics. “It was meant to overcome politics—the stereotype of politics.”

  The professions of innocence, of sincerity and youthful purity, tactical or not, were an important part of the students’ emotional appeal. They fitted the traditional ideal of selfless love of the nation. But they fitted very awkwardly with the pursuit of American dreams. It was this ill-fitting quilt of traditional Chinese idealism and romantic individualism, inspired by fantasies of Western-style freedom, that the students brought with them into exile. America finally enabled Chai Ling, Li Lu, and others to do what they had always wanted—to make up their own lives and fulfill their ambitions. But as with many immigrants, their new lives magnified some of the weaknesses of the new world as well as those of the country they had left behind. Idealism merged with self-promotion—that is the American way. An instinct for survival and a tendency toward paranoia—that is a legacy from China. After listening to Chai Ling’s boosterism of the American way of life, I told her she was the most Americanized Chinese I had ever met. A flash of fearful anger swept across her face: “You must never say that! I am a survivor. If you say that, people in China will hate me!”

  She was right. But some of those people, of an older, more battered generation, were living in America too.

  Liu Binyan was once the most famous journalist in China. In the 1980s, his magazine and newspaper articles exposing official corruption and abuses of power were read, copied, and passed on by millions. Liu was greeted as a kind of savior when he arrived in this town or that to investigate the latest scandal. People camped out in front of his house in Beijing, hoping he might write about their stories of suffering. There were millions, hundreds of millions, of such stories. Liu only had time for a few.

  Liu Binyan was a truly Chinese hero, a loyal Communist who tried to live up to the ideals of the Confucian literati. His aim was to uphold the official dogma—that is, Marxism-Leninism—but to keep it pure from human corruption and restore virtue to the men who ruled in its name. But Liu, like all Chinese men and women who refused to surrender their critical faculties, was punished for speaking his mind. In 1987 he was purged from the Party for “libel and slander” and promoting “bourgeois liberalism.” It was the second time in his life that this had happened. During Mao’s persecution of critical intellectuals in 1957, Liu was stripped of his job and his Party membership and vilified for being an evil “rightist.” His children were turned against him, his wife was forced to denounce him in public, and for years he was made to feed pigs and haul excrement. All this because he had dared to criticize the Party leaders, which showed his “insincere attitude” or, worse, his “independent thinking.” He was “rehabilitated” in 1961, but persecuted again, this time with even fiercer cruelty, in 1969. Allowed to rejoin the Party in 1980, he had several years of respite, as a star reporter for the the People’s Daily, the official Party newspaper.

  Liu loved the Party but could not refrain from reporting what he saw: Party bosses lining their pockets and abusing women (sometimes in exchange for scraps of food) while people who protested were tortured and killed4. “China,” he wrote in his autobiography, A Higher Kind of Loyalty, “seemed like a monstrous mill, continually rolling, crushing all individuality out of the Chinese character. Every one of your words and deeds, every aspect of your life, had to conform to the norm. . . . The unseen mill ground on relentlessly, silently, trying to wear out all edges and create a mass of people with the same set, ingratiating expression when facing their rulers. The net result was to make a virtue of hypocrisy. Between superiors and subordinates, in relationships with one’s own peers, a superficial atmosphere of good fellowship prevailed, while plots and intrigues went on behind your back. But some people, once installed in power, showed their fangs.”

  Enough, you might think, to destroy a man’s faith in communism forever. But Liu still doesn’t blame the dogma. He blames the men who perverted it, the people who were corrupted by power. He, like his tormentors, believes that his enemies are imbued with evil motives. And for saying so, he now lives in the small New Jersey town of Plainsboro.

  The prim row of new suburban houses in shades of white and beige bears no sign of history or aesthetic tradition; the homes are neat but look flimsy, as though not built to last long. There was no sign of people in the hushed street, just the odd car passing by. Plainsboro felt like a long way from anywhere. I sat down with Liu in his living room one November afternoon. The decoration was sparse: a Chinese calligraphy on one wall, some green plants, and a wooden table covered in clippings from American newspapers and Chinese émigré journals. Liu sat in the shadow of the wintry sunlight that slanted through the window. A tall man with slow, ponderous movements and a leathery northern-Chinese face crisscrossed with deep grooves, Liu looked like a melancholy bear. Speaking in English and Chinese, he told me what he thought of the student leaders of 1989.

  “The thing is,” he said, “they knew nothing about history. They thought they were the first democrats in China. But their greatest failing was their personal desire for power.” I recalled something Liu had written after the Beijing Massacre. He had critized the students for being “the most s
elfish generation since 1949.” He said they had no idea of sacrificing themselves for a larger cause.

  I asked him why he thought this should be so. He said it was the influence of the West on Chinese, which is usually negative: materialism, the sexual revolution, that kind of thing. To live in the dark ages and then to be exposed to Western culture too fast—this can only lead to the worst kind of egotism.

  So Liu also suspected the students’ sincerity. Yet I knew from his book that his first rebellious feelings had not been so different from those of the younger generation he criticized. Some of the sentences in his autobiography reminded me of what I had heard from Wu’er Kaixi. Born in the freezing northeast of China in 1925, Liu had joined the Communist revolutionaries because he wanted to fight the Japanese invaders who ransacked China in the 1930s as well as poverty and injustice. But he also wanted, he wrote, to “liberate myself, to realize myself. I could not say precisely what this ‘self’ was, but I had a feeling that there was something in me that, though still undeveloped, would eventually blossom, until one day I would do something special.”

  Liu loved the traditional Chinese theater and read patriotic Communist stories about workers and peasants who gave their lives to the nation. As a young boy, he was inspired by the heroic example of Yue Fei, a twelfth-century military commander whose self-sacrifice is still celebrated in operas and comic books. Yue Fei was one in a long line of Chinese diehards who would not compromise with barbarians at China’s gates, in his case nomads north of the Chinese wall. Before going to war, Yue Fei kneeled before his mother, revealing four characters tattooed on his back: “Serve the country to my utmost.”

  The difference between Liu and the Tiananmen students is that the Communist Party had provided him with a focus for his faith, patriotic ardor, and loyalty. Communism was the correct way to serve China. Unfortunately, however, Liu’s other ambition—to “realize” himself—got in the way. That is what made him a “rightist,” a “counterrevolutionary,” and a “bourgeois liberal”—not despite himself, but because of it. He wanted to believe, but reality kept challenging his faith, and in the end the Party spurned him. The students who came of age after Mao had no such illusions. They had patriotic feelings but no ideology. And they were young enough when they arrived in America to find personal liberation in exile. By contrast, Liu Binyan has found only disillusion. His world has collapsed. He is stuck in an American suburb, because he was betrayed by his own faith at home.