by Ian Buruma
The room went dark as he spoke of his disappointments. Liu had been excited by the Tiananmen rebellion, and in the summer of 1989, when the last vestiges of legitimacy had been stripped from the men in power by their own murderous actions, he expected the regime to crumble. At last he would return home in triumph, to restore virtue to Chinese politics and save not just his country but the best elements of his Marxist beliefs. It never happened. Perhaps Liu’s acrimony toward the “selfish” students is a reflection of his despair. They must take the blame for his dashed hopes. He still writes articles for the émigré press and does talks for Radio Free Asia. The station is jammed in China, but people can sometimes hear it, hissing through the airwaves in the early morning or late at night. Liu’s name cannot be mentioned officially in China, so he is deeply moved when he hears that people in China “still remember me, still miss me.”
I asked him about the hostility within the Chinese diaspora. Why do people hate each other so? He sighed and remained silent, sifting through the newspaper cuttings on the table, trying to find an article about renewed experiments with people’s communes somewhere in central China. He wanted me to see the article, because it showed that Maoism wasn’t all bad. There were still things worth saving from the wreckage. The peasants in collective farms may not be free, but they had enough to eat and that was all they really needed. Surely the equality of life under Mao had been a good thing. There had to be a middle way between communism and American-style capitalism. He couldn’t find the article, but he came around to answering my question. The splits in the democracy movement were not political, he said. Everyone wanted democracy. No, the fights were personal. Too many people wanted to pursue their own profit and fame.
“I think,” he said after another silence, “that a lot of this animosity has to do with Han Chinese culture. For two hundred years we haven’t produced a great thinker. We have invented many practical things, but we have no philosophers, unlike Germany. And no novelists, unlike Russia. For a thousand years we Chinese have struggled to survive. So we are incapable of abstract thinking for a higher cause that does not concern our own interests. We Chinese are too complicated, too clever at playing tricks. Confucian culture makes people hypocritical. Poor people still sit in the dark, without electricity, brooding on their resentments and ways of wreaking revenge, which makes them cruel. I think we have inherited our problems. They are in our Chinese blood.”
It was something I would hear again and again, from Chinese overseas but also in China—this cultural self-loathing, this despair at being Chinese. Bo Yang, a well-known Taiwanese writer, wrote a famous book, published in the 1980s, about the degeneracy of Chinese culture5, The Ugly Chinaman. In it, he deplores the fact that Chinese cannot “find a common language and are constantly at each other’s throats.” He identifies a “neurotic virus” in Chinese culture that makes it impossible for Chinese to admit their mistakes and compromise with others.
I suspect that this kind of disgust is born from disappointed cultural chauvinism. And indeed Bo Yang makes the point that “no other nation on earth has such a long history or such a well-preserved cultural tradition, a tradition which has in the past given rise to an extremely advanced civilization. . . . How is it possible for such a great people to have degenerated to such a state of ugliness? Not only have we been bullied around by foreigners; even worse, for centuries we’ve been bullied around by our own kind—from tyrannical emperors to despotic officials and ruthless mobs. . . .” Bo Yang was jailed for subversion twice—the first time by the Communist government in his native China, the second time in Taiwan, in 1967, for drawing a cartoon that made fun of General Chiang Kai-shek.
“Such a great people . . .” The implication is that China’s political problems could stem only from some cultural catastrophe, a noxious virus infecting Han Chinese blood. But the despair of Bo Yang, or Liu Binyan, is more than a perverse expression of cultural chauvinism; it comes from humiliation, the failure to shake off despotism, the indignity of not being free. For a brief moment in 1989, Chinese all over the world thought the mold would finally break and China would be free. Thus the humiliation of the subsequent failure is blamed on the “radical” student leaders, who were either too “selfish” to sacrifice themselves for China or were typical “ugly Chinamen” who refused to compromise and admit that they had been wrong.
It was not long after I met Liu Binyan that I heard a former activist now living in the U.S., Gong Xiaoxia, confess that she didn’t really want to be Chinese. She didn’t “feel comfortable” with her “own race.” She wondered how it was possible to spend five thousand years building a civilization only to destroy it in two generations. She, too, lived in a suburban American house, on a quiet, tree-lined street, outside Washington D.C., the kind of street where friendly neighbors exchange news about their dogs and then politely go their own way. Gong Xiaoxia lives there alone with her large dog. She was recently divorced from her husband, whom she had met at university in Beijing and accompanied to Harvard in the 1980s, where they both studied. Gong, thirty years younger than Liu Binyan and ten years older than Chai Ling, works for Radio Free Asia in Washington, where she produces programs in the Cantonese language.
She was at Harvard when the Tiananmen demonstrations began. Like Liu Binyan, she was thrilled. Anything that challenged the Chinese regime thrilled her. But she was also frightened as she watched the drama unfold on television. Gong had lived in China for thirty-one years and was disturbed by the idea of sudden change. It brought back bad memories of Red Guards smashing everything “old”—temples, books, ideas, people—to make a permanent revolution, and of disappointments after rebellions in which she had played a part. She was only a few years younger than most Red Guards. She knew how destructive students of her own age had been when they were led by their emotions. Gong no longer believed in “quick fixes” for China’s problems.
She told me her story in a fluent and salty English, pronounced in the harsh, staccato tones of her native Guangzhou (Canton). She liked to talk, at her house, during elaborate Cantonese meals of steamed fish and lemon chicken or in her small office at Radio Free Asia, but she never attempted to charm her listener in the way that the former student leaders Chai Ling, Li Lu, or Wu’er Kaixi did. Indeed, Chai’s ingratiating manners were one thing that filled Gong with loathing. “Always making men feel good, goddamnit. I hate that! Why is she always crying? All that talk about ‘We poor children.’ Goddamnit, she was a married graduate student, not a child. Every time she tried to get sympathy that way, I wanted to say: ‘Goddamnit, stand up for yourself! Don’t beg for sympathy.’ I hate that way of inviting men’s cheap sympathy!” I observed Gong during these tirades—with her short-cropped hair, her stocky frame, her sensible trousers and sturdy shoes that still smacked of an earlier China—and realized that she and Chai, though only ten years apart in age, had grown up in different countries.
Gong Xiaoxia was born into a family of intellectuals who paid the price for their pre-Communist education. During the Cultural Revolution, her grandfather was jailed as a counterrevolutionary, her grandmother went mad, her mother was sent to a remote village, and her father was arrested as a Russian spy (he spoke Russian). But Gong’s worst suffering came a few years later, in the early 1970s, after she joined an underground group led by former Red Guards who tried to promote a more democratic form of socialism. She described the reasons she had become involved in this highly dangerous enterprise. They were emotional more than political. In fact, using almost the same words as Chai Ling, she told me they were “anti-political.” She said: “We had to engage in politics in daily life. You get so tired of that; good people suffer so much, bad people get ahead. So you get involved in the politics of anti-politics, the politics of idealism.” On another occasion, she also said something sadder: “Look at the kind of people who join the democracy movement. They all had miserable childhoods. They join out of desperation. Because there is nothing else for them. They are all crazy.”
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Gong was a misfit, a bookish girl without many friends. During the Cultural Revolution, when books, looted from “bourgeois” households, could sometimes be picked out of the debris left by marauding Red Guards, she came across Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. She was shocked by the realization that her parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts were not bad people after all, but victims of political madness. And the notion that Stalin had been responsible for so much suffering terrified her. She was like a child who suddenly realizes she can no longer believe in God. She expected to be punished, or her body to change, or to be struck by lightning. But there was no one to talk to. Despair drove her to attempt suicide.
Gong’s state of mute shock lasted until 1974, when she read a sensational manifesto tacked onto a wall in Beijing Road in Guangzhou. The text was highly provocative. The Chinese Revolution, it claimed, had never resulted in a true people’s democracy. The masses were deprived of their rights to free speech and association, while “fascist” Party bosses ruled like feudal lords. These incendiary words were signed by an unknown figure named Li Yi Zhe—in fact the collective pen name of four local activists, all of whom were to spend years in jail. Gong joined them in a state of excitement; with them at least she would no longer feel alone. She wanted their “intellectual companionship.” With them she could speak her mind. It was as though she had found an island of truth in a society of liars. One of the authors of the proclamation, a former Red Guard leader named Chen Yiyang, became her first lover. Like her, he came from a “bad” class background; his father had been an important figure in Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT).
The inevitable happened. The self-proclaimed democrats were crushed. Chen Yiyang was sentenced to fifteen years in jail (his spirit was broken after two, when he was released). Gong spent her twenty-first birthday in solitary confinement. Later, she would spend years working in a candy factory, where she lost a finger in a faulty machine. But the worst thing was not prison or the drudgery of manual work. It was the humiliation that came with her arrest. Gong’s parents, who had been so badly damaged by politics themselves, denounced their daughter in public. Her mother wrote letters to the Party, giving examples of Gong’s “bad attitude” and “selfish character.” Gong’s private letters were confiscated and read out loud in public. Every embarrassing detail of her personal life was put on display. Gong prods her eyes with a tissue as she recalls the torment. She never spoke to her parents again.
No wonder Gong, the veteran of persecutions and several failed attempts at radical change, finds the students of 1989 too soft and “goddamn sentimental.” She was in Beijing in 1979, when hopes raised by the Democracy Wall were betrayed by Deng Xiaoping, who cracked down on the young activists he had encouraged at the start. Gong thought the Tiananmen leaders, or at least the most “radical” among them, were not only soft but also reckless. Theirs was the recklessness of criminal naÏveté, for they had no idea what they were up against. The Communist government is like “a mad beast.” It is folly to provoke it, for it will “tear up your flesh.” Repeated failure taught Gong Xiaoxia that you have to “play with the beast,” compromise with it, nudge it in the right direction, choose the way of slow reform instead of confrontation. This is something the students, in Gong’s view, never understood. Whatever it was they demanded, which was never very clear, their demands grew ever more extreme. Like an irresponsible general, Chai Ling led her troops to the slaughter.
I argued with Gong. Surely, I said, it wasn’t fair to compare Chai Ling to a general. No one in Tiananmen Square was under any obligation to follow her orders. Chai Ling never led the Square anyway—the Square led her: The people who were still there on June 3, defying government orders to leave, were mostly provincial students, workers, and others who felt there was nothing to gain from retreat. In any case, I continued, the students’ demands were never extreme. All they had ever asked for was freedom of speech and association and to be officially acknowledged as “patriots,” after they had been described in a People’s Daily editorial as “troublemakers.” And, in any case, they never resorted to violence.
Yes, said Gong, but Chai should have taken responsibility for her actions. Instead, all she thinks about are her own selfish interests.
So it was back to that again: attitude, sincerity, character.
Unlike Liu Binyan, Gong Xiaoxia doesn’t feel trapped or marooned in America. For her, as for Chai Ling, coming to America was a liberation. Gong had always felt like an outsider in China, an “uncontrollable kid,” a “bull in a china shop.” That is why she loves the United States—she no longer feels like such a misfit. “In China,” she said, “we had no principles. We were taught how to cheat and to lie shamelessly. To be dishonest was not a problem. People were rewarded for that. So you disconnect what you say you believe and what you really want. Chinese are not disconnected with reality but with themselves. I got much of that back in America.”
We were sitting in her room as she spoke, shoeless in the Chinese manner, our slippered feet on a furry white rug, her great dog padding up to lick his mistress. An enormous television set was on, without sound. It was a program about humanitarian aid agencies being aired. Pictures of famished children and tortured bodies flashed silently across the outsize screen.
Gong had left China behind and yet so much about her, from her sturdy shoes to the anarchic way she drove through traffic, from her Cantonese accent to her moral attitudes, was marked by the first thirty-one years of her life. She was not raised with materialist values, she said. She did not understand such things as career moves and publicity. Listening to her speak about the students of Tiananmen, I often felt that what she disapproved of most was their softer ride in life. They had had it too easy—in China, where they had escaped the worst persecutions, and in the United States, where, after only a year or two, they managed to adopt the behavior of Americans as though they had been born there.
Perhaps Chai Ling cried too much. And yet she is also accused of crying too little. For she wants closure, and personal space, and a career. She does not cry in public for the people who lost their lives in June 1989. And this, her critics say, shows her “insincerity.” I do not know whether crying is the most reliable sign of sincerity. It is often thought so in East Asia.
The first time I saw Wang Chaohua, she was crying in a documentary, Moving the Mountain, made in 1995, about Tiananmen. It was a facile, celebratory film based largely on Li Lu’s memoir of the same title. Amid a great deal of talk by Chai, Li Lu, and Wu’er Kaixi about heroism and democracy, Wang Chaohua was the only one who cried. She felt guilty for the people who were killed. And yet it was Wang who had counseled restraint in 1989.
I met Wang in the library of UCLA, where she was studying Chinese literature. A soft wind blew though the cypress trees outside. Tall, soft-spoken, and nearsighted, Wang was watchful and paused to think before saying anything. Her accent was not as American as that of Chai Ling or Li Lu. Premature lines under her eyes and at the corners of her mouth hinted at hardship. There had been a bad marriage in China and she had had to leave her only child behind, out of reach. Because Wang was older than the other student leaders but younger than most Beijing intellectuals who played a part, she was a misfit in the Tiananmen Movement, hesitant to impose herself; yet she was forceful when she felt she had to be. She was one of the few Chinese I met in America who did not denounce the student leaders. People had unrealistic expectations of Chinese exiles, she said, and it was unfair to lump their subsequent behavior in America together with what had happened in Beijing. Not that she especially liked Chai Ling or Li Lu; she said they were “lacking in principles.” But her differences with them were not so much personal or ideological as tactical.
Like many of those who were older than herself, she saw the events from the perspective of earlier rebellions. That is why she had favored a hunger strike at first. She remembered from the Cultural Revolution how effective it could be. But she reconsidered when s
he came to feel that the students’ aims were fuzzy and their timing wrong. Wang was furious when Chai Ling and her male coterie had suddenly announced a hunger strike on May 11. Convinced that there was still room for negotiation with the government, Wang screamed at the hunger strikers: They were just doing this out of desperate bravado, to overcome their feeling of impotence. Chai shouted back that she was a student of psychology and didn’t need Wang’s psychoanalysis. Wang tried to enlist the help of famous intellectuals, such as the journalist Dai Qing, to make the students stop. Dai Qing, a formidable speaker, came to the Square and told the students that they had already scored a great victory. “The students are good,” she said. The students were patriots. But if there were any further provocation (or “noise,” as she put it) from the students, they risked setting back political progress for twenty years.
There was, however, another reason for Wang’s misgivings. She had learned as a Red Guard that nothing succeeds without a solid organization. Lacking that, a protest movement is bound to collapse. So Wang pleaded with the students to go back to their classrooms and consolidate their gains. They should develop independent student unions and branch out from there. Ten years later, she explained her case patiently to me, ticking off every point on her fingers in the Chinese manner: “One: Without organization, you lack proper procedures and radicalism takes over. Two: You need to be able to speak for a constituency. And the students’ constituency was on campus. Without that constituency, you had no base to fight the Communists.” Procedures rather than drama, consolidation rather than escalation, organization rather than emotion. Anything rather than repeating the bloody chaos of the Cultural Revolution. But Wang never referred to Chai and the hunger strikers as “Mao’s best students.” She knew the difference, from her own experience. Red Guards fought blindly for idiotic principles. The students, in her view, were driven by vanity. But their vanity was stoked by intellectuals, who used the students to promote their own political views. They were mostly to blame for the consequent disaster, not the students, who were “just kids.”
