by Ian Buruma
The reform movement of 1898, from which Dai Qing drew historical lessons, confronted a situation not unlike China in the 1980s. A corrupt regime was hanging on to power. Nationalism, both anti-foreign (the Qing were Manchus) and anti-government, was rampant. Almost everyone wanted China to change. But how? Some advocated outright revolution. Others urged moderation. But the reformers, as always, were divided: Some rallied around the young “reformist” emperor to instigate radical political changes from the top; others, known as the “self-strengtheners,” talked about invigorating China through educational and economic reforms. The young emperor did his best, but his reforms came to nothing. His mother, the ferocious empress-dowager, took power away from him. The self-strengtheners criticized the more radical reformers for being extreme. Some “extremists” were executed, some fled the country. The conservatives around the empress-dowager had won.
It was not the self-strengtheners, however, whom Dai Qing had come to praise in her speech but the radical political reformers. Why? Because they were right, in her view, to seek the patronage of the emperor. She contrasted their wisdom with the recklessness of the revolutionaries. Her point was that benevolent dictatorship should work. Why then did the reformers fail? They failed, she said, because the emperor was too impatient; he should have waited before introducing the reforms, bided his time. She made these points before the Tiananmen demonstrations began. But her basic ideas were the same: Reformers and liberals were on the right track; together with the “young emperor” Zhao Ziyang, they would have succeeded by biding their time. Then the student “revolutionaries” ruined everything. The “empress-dowager” Deng Xiaoping was guilty of murder. But Chai Ling and her allies wrecked the reforms. That is what Zhao Ziyang came to tell them, with tears in his eyes, on the Square on May 19, 1989: “It’s too late,” he said, “too late.” If only they had been more patient, bided their time . . .
And yet the students of Tiananmen were not violent revolutionaries. This is an imaginary role foisted on them for the sake of making up a historical narrative, a neat story of moderates and extremists, radicals and compromisers. It is too pat. To gain a better perspective on the Rashomon of Tiananmen it might actually help to forget for a moment about China and its long history. For in a curious way, the interpretations of Tiananmen echo a debate in England more than two centuries ago between John Locke and David Hume: Locke believed that new institutions and new political contracts could set people free, as it were, overnight, while Hume argued that historical arrangements had to be respected and that a bad established order was still better than unpredictable change.
But China being China, such political debates swiftly take a personal turn, and revolve around sincerity, character, and motives. And that is why I found myself, at a café on 16th Street, discussing with Dai Qing not Hume or Locke or the future of democracy in China but gossip that had trickled through the émigré grapevine, such as the absurdity of Chai Ling’s pet dog, the fur coat of a political rock star’s wife, and the opportunism of Li Lu’s finances.
Chapter 2
Waiting for the Messiah
The Chinese Protestant church in Glendale, California, might not seem an obvious place to meet a dissident writer. But I had been troubled by a cliché that kept popping up in conversations about China: the “spiritual vacuum.” Again and again, this alleged vacuum was blamed for China’s current ills. The Chinese, I was told, were in dire need of religion. Li Lu mentioned it at length in his Madison Avenue office. And so did many other Chinese, as well as foreign experts (who often reflect the views of their favorite sources). Some were a surprise. I met a young veteran of Tiananmen, Richard Li, who was using the Internet to promote Chinese democracy from Washington, D.C. His inspiration had come from reading books about the “new age of global communication” by the futurist John Naisbitt. Li, a cool computer nerd and former Wall Street broker—and hardly a religious crank—explained to me one day that the Chinese could not love one another. The Chinese, he said, lacked a religion that teaches love. The Chinese needed Jesus.
The man in Glendale, California, was named Yuan Zhiming. Yuan was a moderately well-known writer in China and had become sufficiently involved in Tiananmen to be forced to flee in 1989. He had written parts of River Elegy, a polemical television documentary series broadcast in 1988, a kind of lament for everything that appeared to the authors to have gone wrong with Chinese civilization. There were strong hints in the film that the Communist leaders were as hidebound, dictatorial, and conservative as the semi-divine emperors who had ruled China in the past. The six-part series caused a sensation when it was broadcast. Zhao Ziyang and his faction of reformist intellectuals supported it, but conservatives—that is to say, Party hard-liners in China and Chinese traditionalists overseas—hated it. China’s vice president, an army man and Long March veteran named Wang Zhen, also known as “Big Cannon,” attacked the filmmakers for not “loving China.” Big Cannon was proud of never having read a book and was also a strong advocate of violence to put down the student demonstrations. After June 4, 1989, River Elegy was denounced as an evil influence on “correct thinking” and partly blamed for the “turmoil” in Tiananmen Square.
Ten years later, Yuan Zhiming was traveling around America preaching the Christian gospel. His aim, he said, was to convert every Chinese to the Christian faith. His message was that China could be saved only in the arms of Jesus. I found Yuan’s telephone number and made an appointment to see him at his local church on Broadway, in Glendale.
The church itself was a newish, dull-brick building on a street half an hour’s drive from downtown L.A.—not quite louche enough to be Raymond Chandler territory, more shabbily genteel. Next to the church was a kindergarten, where Chinese families were finishing their evening meal at a long wooden table. People smiled at me in that beatific way of religious converts. I asked for Yuan and was pointed toward another room. There was no sign of him, but there were others in this sober room with bare white walls, waiting to see a video about Yuan Zhiming’s life.
I sat down. Before the show began, a jaunty young minister from Hong Kong, dressed in an open-collared shirt and brown slacks, led the congregation in some Chinese hymns, which contained such phrases as “My Lord, my only Lord . . . bless China, and the Gospel in China.” He then gave a short sermon about the need to love China, almost as though China were as much the object of worship as our Lord. New members were invited to stand up and introduce themselves and tell us where they were from. Most were from different parts of mainland China: Shanghai, Hunan, Fujian. A few smiled; some looked absolutely miserable. A woman next to me whispered that the congregation used to be mainly Taiwanese but that most recent converts were young mainlanders.
The room went dark, and the video came to life with images of Tiananmen Square—not, however, of the demonstrations in April or the hunger strike in May, but only of the bloody denouement on June 4. The stress, clearly, was on the sacrifice of the innocents. Yuan had been in the Square until June 3, we were told, after which he escaped to Paris. There were shots of Paris, of pigeons fluttering around the Sacré-Coeur. Feeling rejected by his motherland, Yuan went into a deep depression. Images of the massacre haunted him (and kept recurring in the video). Every time the face of Premier Li Peng, the man most people blame for the massacre, appeared on the screen, the audience hissed. Yuan was troubled by his personal life, too. Close-ups of his eyes filled with tears made him look like a mater dolorosa.
Yuan’s marriage in Beijing had turned bad. There had been violence in the home. Yuan had a brutal temper. But he couldn’t bear to be alone in the U.S. He missed his wife. Depression turned into despair until one day he met Chinese Christians, who invited him to “bear witness” and “receive Christ.” Despair lifted. Yuan prayed for his family to join him in exile. A miracle happened; his prayers were answered. But the marital problems continued. His wife refused to receive Christ, because, as she put it, reasonably I thought, she had come to America to be free and not
to replace one kind of prison with another. There were shots of Yuan praying alone, on his knees, for the salvation of his wife. Again, a miracle. She joined the church, first to learn English and make friends, but then to bear witness, with tears streaming down her face. The marriage was saved. An unctuous Chinese minister in a blue blazer informed us that all Chinese were waiting to be awakened by the Lord. In the last shot, Yuan stood on the Great Wall, during a recent trip to China, gazing blissfully into the horizon, saying: “Where there is God there is freedom.”9
The lights came on, and there was Yuan himself, beaming behind a pulpit, in a gray tweed jacket, a sleek, handsome man in his late forties with plump red lips, the type of genial vicar female parishioners like to ply with cakes. He talked about China. On his recent trip, he had felt an even greater love for his country than before. But he could not fail to notice the “spiritual vacuum” in the Chinese people, the emptiness in their hearts. He saw the bitterness and hatred that consumed them. This terrible situation could be remedied only by faith in God, for God loves us all equally, and only God would save China. Many of us, he continued, wanted to change China politically, but there was a more pressing task ahead: China had to be changed spiritually, by spreading the word of God.
I was fascinated to know what possessed a dissident Chinese writer to take this particular turn. Indeed, Yuan was not the only one. Of the five authors of River Elegy, four had fled to the United States and two became evangelical Christians. One had been sorely tempted, and only one remained staunchly immune to the blandishments of the church. Then there was Zhang Boli, one of the student leaders on Tiananmen, who worshipped at the same church as Yuan Zhiming. And Han Dongfang, who had spoken for the workers in Tiananmen Square. He too had “received Jesus.” Chinese friends whom I asked about these conversions cast the usual cynical aspersions on the motives of the converts: They didn’t really believe in any of this stuff but were acting out of self-interest; they wanted to get money from the Americans; they wanted power, they were “rice Christians”; the Chinese people were so complicated and double-faced; and so on. I couldn’t believe things were quite that simple. There are, after all, tens of millions of Christians in China, in the official Party-sanctioned churches, and many more in clandestine, private “house churches.”
The last time a serious attempt was made to convert the Chinese people to the Christian God—by native Chinese rather than by foreign missionaries—was in the 1850s. It was a bad time in Chinese history. China had been defeated in the Opium War. The Manchu rulers were hated for being oppressive, corrupt, decadent, and foreign. Time was ripe for another millenarian rebellion. It began after Hong Xiuquan, a failed Confucian scholar, became deliriously ill and saw visions of God and Jesus Christ. Hong was convinced that he was Jesus’ younger brother, enlisted in the war against Satan. Satan was a foreigner oppressing China from the Manchu throne. Hong’s aim was to establish the Heavenly Kingdom on earth. The name of his movement was Taiping, or Great Peace. The capital of the Heavenly Kingdom was Nanjing, which the Taipings captured in 1853.
Heaven on earth turned out to be a rather harsh mishmash of Chinese and quasi-Christian traditions. Hong was to be known as Heavenly King, or Lord of Ten Thousand Years, and took on many of the trappings of a Chinese emperor. But there was a streak of egalitarianism in the kingdom, too: Women were told to unbind their feet and were appointed as officers and administrators. Even though the younger brother of Jesus had many concubines, known as princesses, the men of his realm were separated from the women, and those who broke the rules of chastity were clubbed to death with heavy poles10. Private property was more or less abolished and replaced by a communal system of ownership. And to make sure people were not confused by incorrect or impure thoughts, Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian temples and symbols were destroyed. God voiced his approval of these measures in poems handed down through Jesus in fine classical Chinese.
Heaven on earth lasted until 1864. By the beginning of that year, Heavenly troops were being slaughtered by the Qing imperial army all over southern China and the Heavenly Capital was under siege. Food had run out, but Hong told his starving people not to worry, for God would provide manna from Heaven. No one was quite sure what manna was. In any case, it failed to fall from the skies and the Heavenly King himself fell ill and died or, in the Taiping version, ascended to Heaven to join his elder brother. Countless others died as well, their rotting, emaciated corpses covered by a thin layer of earth to ease the passage of their souls to Heaven. Imperial soldiers dug tunnels under the city walls, and hideous underground battles ensued, with soldiers on both sides drowning in sewage or blown up by cannon balls thudding through the dark. By the time the capital had fallen and the Taiping armies were finally defeated, millions of people had died as a consequence of Hong’s holy visions.
Karl Marx had followed the Taiping rebellion with a sympathetic eye from London, seeing it as a gathering of dissident forces11 “in one formidable revolution.” And there are parallels to be found in Mao’s vision of an egalitarian, puritanical, communitarian utopia. Like Hong, Mao merged Chinese and foreign dreams with bewildering and fatal results. Maoism, too, reflected an ancient Chinese tradition of millenarian movements.
Popular rebellions were no doubt the result of economic hardship, political oppression, corruption of local officials, and the like. But the role played by religion is important. Many uprisings were challenges to the rulers’ legimitacy, which is closely linked to religion. The Middle Kingdom was traditionally seen as the center of a cosmological order, and the Chinese emperors were at the apex of this order. Their rule had to be blessed by Heaven. Without this divine mandate, they would fall. The mandate fell only to the virtuous, as defined in Confucian ethics. The scholar-officials were the clergy, who cultivated virtue in themselves and their rulers. They interpreted the dogmas upon which the order under Heaven depended. Any moral challenges from heterodox traditions outside the Confucian mainstream were thus a danger to the regime.
People who joined the folk rebellions were often social misfits and outsiders, indeed they were often men who had failed to make it into the ranks of the scholar-officials. Hong was such a man. Like many of his followers, he was from the community of Hakkas, literally “guest people,” who still speak their own language and have their own cuisine and whose ancestors migrated from central China to the south many centuries ago. Hong’s plan, like that of other religious rebels, was not just to take power away from the ruling dynasty but to replace one cosmic order with another, by installing an alternative Kingdom of Heaven, and restore virtue to a corrupt world. Attempts such as Hong’s—and Mao’s—usually end up as distorted replicas of the very thing they seek to destroy. Hence Hong, and indeed Mao, began to behave more and more like a traditional Chinese emperor as his empire grew in power and size.
The makers of the television series River Elegy could not have been further removed from the peasant fanatics, oddball mystics, and religious rebels of the alternative Chinese tradition. Or so one might think. They were successful, rather high-minded Beijing intellectuals, who enjoyed excellent relations with the reformists in the Communist Party, including the Party secretary, Zhao Ziyang. The original idea for the film was not even controversial. In 1985, a young television director named Xia Jun was asked to make a documentary about the Yellow River, one of the magnificent, eternal symbols of Chinese civilization, along with the dragon and the Great Wall. But when he began to film the actual river, he was shocked by the misery and poverty he encountered. Magnificent as the idealized Yellow River might have been as a symbol, the ugly reality could not be ignored. And so, out of sheer disgust, the idea was born to use the symbols of China to launch an attack on the actual state of the nation. Since China in the 1980s was going through a fashionable wave of cultural self-criticism, the timing was right.
In one episode, the Great Wall is attacked as a symbol of China’s inward-looking, closed, authoritarian xenophobia. “Ah, Great Wall,” the narrator crie
s, “why do we still sing your praises? How could Chinese trade freely behind the walls, trapped in their agricultural society?”
In another episode, the dragon is portrayed as a token of power worship and totalitarian failure. And the Yellow River itself is associated with a sluggish, unchanging history, interrupted only by ghastly convulsions. These symbols—yellow as the earth of China’s heartland, isolated, agricultural, conservative—are contrasted to an idealized vision of the enlightened West: ocean-blue, seafaring, mercantile, and free. Images of stagnant China and the rampant West—toiling peasants and ancient monuments on the one side, skyscrapers, ports, and stock exchanges on the other—are spliced together by a narrator’s voice, which manages, in the Chinese Communist tradition, to be histrionic and didactic at the same time12: “Oh, you heirs of the dragon, what the Yellow River could give us has already been given to our ancestors. . . . What we need to create now is a brand-new civilization. . . .”
And then come the intellectuals. We see, among others, Zheng Yi, a writer who encouraged the students to go on a hunger strike in 1989, dressed in a modish black suit, a cigarette smoldering in his right hand, discussing the relationship between earth and man. But most revealing of the River Elegy authors’ view of themselves is the text written by Yuan Zhiming, together with another writer now living in America, Xie Xuanjun. Intellectuals, they claimed, had found it hard13 to “consolidate their economic interests or hold independent political opinions; for thousands of years they have been no more than appendages. . . . Their talents have been manipulated, their wills twisted, their souls castrated, their backbones bent. They have even been murdered. Nonetheless, they hold in their hands the weapon that can destroy ignorance and superstition, for they are the ones who can communicate directly with the civilization of the sea, who can irrigate the yellow earth with the blue waters of the spring of science and democracy.”
