Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  In the Beijing courts, in 1979 and 1993, Wei had had the marvelous effrontery to lecture his judges calmly on human rights before they put him away—on both occasions for more than ten years of prison and hard labor. His remarks in Washington, spoken in purring northern Chinese, showed the same self-assurance. Wei leaned forward as his words were translated to the committee, nodding vigorously as though to drive each point home with his chin. People in the West may think that human-rights conditions in China were improving, but in fact, he said, this assumption was absolutely incorrect. The recent arrests showed clearly that the Chinese Communist Party was not about to relax its grip on power and that only constant pressure from the West would force the government to make any concessions. He himself probably owed his life to such pressure. He added, for the benefit of the Democrats on the committee, that every nation, including the United States, had a history of human-rights abuses. The American slave trade had been an appalling thing, to be sure, and the situation in places such as Burma and East Timor may be very bad too. But China was different: China was bigger, more powerful, and thus more dangerous. And it was, in any case, morally wrong, as well as misguided, to criticize smaller, weaker nations while not daring to speak out against China.

  Wei’s testimony was an astonishing performance: a model of concise analysis, which made the rhetorical preening of some of the congressmen look fatuous (C-SPAN cameras were on hand to provide live television coverage to the voters back home). And here was a man who had spent much of his adult life in solitary confinement, with only police interrogators and hardened criminals, ordered to beat him up, for occasional company. (In the cold, bleak fastness of a labor camp in western China, Wei was once given the rare privilege of being allowed to keep a rabbit, a source of profound happiness; but with a change of guards, the privilege was swiftly taken away.)

  The incident that sent such ripples across the Chinese political diaspora occurred only seconds after the hearing was over. The cameras were still running, red lights blinking. But the committee members had already risen from their chairs and were slipping their papers into blue plastic folders. Suddenly a voice cried out in Chinese from the back of the chamber: “You are not representative of the Chinese people! How dare you speak for the democracy movement! You insulted Xu Wenli! You are beneath contempt!”

  A man in a shabby blue suit rushed forward to where Wei was standing. One of the congressmen tapped a microphone and asked: “Can we have a translation please?”

  The man in the blue suit became more and more agitated and made as if to attack Wei physically. Another Chinese man, dressed more expensively, in a brown silk suit and shiny crocodile shoes, was watching the commotion. As Wei, who remained silent, was eased out of the room by his supporters, a third Chinese man, in a thick gray sweater, began to shout abuse: “He is scum! My wife is still in jail in China and nobody says anything about that. But everything that motherfucking scoundrel says is reported in The New York Times!” Then he turned to a pale, thin man in the audience. “And you,” he shouted, jabbing his finger into the thin man’s chest. “If you can’t stop bad-mouthing Xu Wenli, you should go back and rot in jail!”

  When the police finally arrived, the man in the crocodile shoes said, “Enough,” and the rumpus died almost as quickly as it had started. Only the man in the shabby blue suit raged on for a bit and had to be restrained by his friends. He had an odd face, slightly horsey, with large eyes and a sharp nose, features more common among some of the ethnic minorities than the Han Chinese. And I suddenly remembered where I had seen him before.

  Earlier that year, I had attended a rather melancholy gathering of exiled Chinese activists in what was still the Portuguese colony of Macau. This was just after the fall of General Suharto in Indonesia. There was a sense of futility about the meeting: people who had once been important in China sounding off to an indifferent world. And there, in that hot and airless schoolroom, rented for the occasion, this man had stood up to make an emotional statement about solidarity with the Indonesian democrats: Today Jakarta, tomorrow Beijing! It was a noble gesture, especially in the somewhat rancid air of Chinese self-absorption. His name was Wang Xizhe.

  At one time, Wang’s heroic status had matched that of Wei Jingsheng. Wang was one of the authors of the famous manifesto posted on a wall in Guangzhou (Canton) in 1974, signed Li Yi Zhe, demanding democratic rights and criticizing the Party bosses (though not Mao) for being corrupt bureaucratic fascists. It was Wang’s group that Gong Xiaoxia, my friend in Washington, D.C., had joined, thrilled to find an oasis of serious debate in a brainwashed society. The group would meet every week in a one-room apartment to discuss Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao—and also Solzhenitsyn, John Locke, and Max Weber. Wang, taller and more forceful than the others, had stood out even then. He liked to be the center of attention.

  The Li Yi Zhe essay, which went on for sixty-seven densely written pages, was the first major attack on the Communist regime from the Cultural Revolution generation. It was an attack from the left: The revolution had reneged on its promise to give power to the people. Instead of socialism, Chinese Communist rule had imposed a more ferocious form of feudal despotism. The particular tone of this attack, its revolutionary passion, had everything to do with the authors’ experiences as Red Guards.

  Wang had been a student in Guangzhou when the Cultural Revolution began. Full of enthusiasm to “make revolution” and smash “bureaucratism,” he joined the second wave of Red Guards in 1966, the so-called rebel faction, which concentrated on purging Party cadres. Mao, supported by his wife, Jiang Qing, and her extremist group, the Gang of Four, had deliberately incited the first wave of students—mostly children of the Party elite—to attack their elders, drag them out of their offices and homes, force them onto their knees, beat them, spit on them, torture them, daub them with ink, put dunce caps on them, and make them confess their heinous political crimes. If the “capitalist roaders” and “stinking reactionaries” should die in the process, then so be it. This was Mao’s way of breaking the power of Party bureaucrats and thus ensuring the continuation of his absolute rule.

  This first wave had included Wei Jingsheng, the son of a high official. The second wave was less rooted in the Communist upper class. Neither Wang nor his friends, such as Gong Xiaoxia’s lover Chen Yiyang, were from the elite. On the contrary. They were sometimes from the wrong class—that is, their parents were educated people tainted by the ancien régime.

  Hierarchies were turned topsy-turvy. Rebellion was blessed. Mao was God. But when the students began to develop their own ideas, roaming around the country in armed gangs, threatening to rush beyond Mao’s grasp, and fighting one another, first wave against second wave, army units against Red Guards, faction against faction, they too had to be crushed. In 1968 Mao’s erstwhile “little generals” were hunted down by the police, arrested, and sent to remote villages to “learn from the peasants.” This is what happened to Wei Jingsheng. It is what happened to Wang Xizhe and Chen Yiyang and the rest of their group.

  The sense of betrayed expectations is palpable in the Li Yi Zhe manifesto25: “The freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of association, which are stipulated in the Constitution, and the freedom of exchanging revolutionary experience, which is not stipulated in the Constitution, have all been truly practiced in the great revolution and granted with the support of the Party Central headed by Chairman Mao. This is something which the Chinese people had not possessed for several thousand years, something so active and lively; and this is the extraordinary achievement of the revolution. But our Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has not accomplished its tasks because it has not enabled the people to grasp the weapon of mass democracy.”

  It is a slightly odd statement to read now, long after the event, since the quasi-religious worship of Chairman Mao can hardly be described as “freedom.” Yet the violent anarchy of the 1960s gave millions of young people their first taste of attacking state authority, or indeed any
authority except Mao’s. As a result of the manifesto, Wang and his colleagues were denounced as “reactionaries” and forced to do hard labor in the countryside. Under the Gang of Four, the reactionary label was often a death sentence. Wang Xizhe survived his time in detention but was sentenced again after Mao’s death in 1976. This time, absurdly, he and his friends were charged with being counterrevolutionary followers of the Gang of Four and maintaining clandestine links with Taiwan and Hong Kong. After a year in a detention center, he was freed. But worse was still in store.

  Even as Wei Jingsheng was causing a sensation in Beijing in 1978 by posting his manifesto, advocating the Fifth Modernization (democracy), on the Democracy Wall, Wang was busy writing political essays in Guangzhou, which he sent by mail as mimeographed “newsletters”—a crude harbinger of the e-mail networks that were to come twenty years later. Both men said they wanted democracy, but their politics were not at all the same. Wang had begun to recognize Mao as the monster he was. He described him as a typical Chinese peasant rebel who founded a new dynasty and ruled as a traditional despot. Mao was not a true Marxist in Wang’s view. But Wang still was a Marxist, and like most dissident intellectuals, including Xu Wenli, who later founded the China Democracy Party, he believed that a reformed Communist Party could deliver a better society. Since Deng Xiaoping had also been purged during the Cultural Revolution and was now promising new liberties, he should have the benefit of the doubt. Deng, so Wang believed, offered the best chance of achieving real democratic socialism.

  Wei disagreed. Almost alone among his fellow activists of the Democracy Wall period, Wei warned that without radical political change, Deng would turn out to be a tyrant just like the countless Chinese despots who had preceded him. Without the freedom to criticize and vote, there could be no check on absolute personal power. Wei turned out to be right.

  Deng, just as Mao had done so often before, used the free-spirited young before turning on them. He needed the support of Democracy Wall activists to oust the remnants of the Gang of Four and take power himself. Once he ruled China, he got rid of his critics. Wei Jingsheng, who had caused the greatest offense by attacking Deng by name, was the first to disappear into the Chinese gulag. Others quickly followed. But even then Wang Xizhe did not see what was coming. He thought Deng was being indiscriminate in his crackdown on Democracy Wall but that the arrest of Wei was defensible26. “Some people,” Wang wrote, “criticize Deng for sentencing Wei Jingsheng simply for having spoken up. I disagree. Deng’s main problem was to keep the situation under control after a long period of repression. Both history and common sense show that social upheavals that are too radical often alienate the people.”

  It was the classic line of the reformist intellectual, to be repeated by many others: avoid chaos at all costs, give “the doves” in the Party some time, democracy can wait, maybe socialism can still be saved. In 1989, the journalist Dai Qing used more or less the same argument to attack the student “radicals.” Not that it helped Wang when the despot’s eyes came to rest on him. For Deng did not give him the benefit of the doubt. In 1981, Wang too entered the dark maw of the Chinese prison system, where he was locked up for long spells in a solitary cell. A former inmate of the same prison remembers being spooked at night by Wang’s lonely howls echoing through the corridors. Wang did not reemerge into the light until 1993. Like Xu Wenli’s, his hair had gone white.

  Here they were, then, Wang and Wei, brave and damaged veterans of the Chinese gulag, face-to-face in a government chamber in Washington, D.C., one man screaming in rage, the other silently turning his back. Why were relations so venomous between men who should be allies? Did it go back to old differences?: Red Guard rivalries between snooty, northern Beijing and despised Guangzhou, or quarrels about tactics, radical democratic change as opposed to slow, Party-led reform? Was it guilt, perhaps, or resentment to do with Wang’s defense of Wei’s arrest in 1979? Or was it simply a matter of jealousy and frustration?

  Wei, after all, was still being described as the “father of Chinese democracy.” He still had the ear of foreign ministers, American congressmen, and Washington columnists, while Wang had become a shadowy figure since his arrival in the U.S., one of many dissidents trying to find a role, attracting attention by periodic hunger strikes, attempting to join the Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan (unsuccessfully), or trying to enter China without any chance of success. Just before the Washington incident, Wang had been on a brief hunger strike in front of the United Nations in New York. A pamphlet handed out at the occasion concluded: “We wish that our voices be heard by the entire world.” They seldom were.

  I remembered a conversation with the former student leader Li Lu, who was of course a generation younger. After Tiananmen, Li had been through feuds of his own, between “moderates” and “radicals.” He offered a cultural explanation. Chinese culture, he said, produces either a slave mentality or extreme individualism. Those who refuse to be slaves are fighters. And the first to rebel expect to be leaders. The fighters in exile live in a small Chinese ghetto, where everybody knows everybody. And so they fight one another.

  The picture Li paints of life in the “ghetto” is plausible. These are all damaged people, prone to expend their frustrated energies on devouring each other. But there is more to it than psychological trauma. In the absence of an institutional mechanism, such as the vote, to resolve political conflicts and give legitimacy to leadership claims, feuding and intrigue take over. This is not only true of politics in exile but of politics in China itself, or indeed in any dictatorship. If the people cannot choose their rulers, the rulers will decide on the pecking order themselves, through patronage, family connections, and raw, sometimes murderous skulduggery. Joseph Conrad caught the poisoned atmosphere of late czarist Russia perfectly in Under Western Eyes, his novel about the treacherous student, Razumov, living among revolutionary exiles in Geneva: “ ‘Oh, we are great in talking about each other,’ interjected Razumov, who had listened with great attention. ‘Gossip, tales, suspicions, and all that sort of thing, we know how to deal in to perfection. Calumny, even.’ ”

  The pecking order among the exiles revolves around a key phrase: zige, meaning “credentials” or “qualifications.” To be a leader you need zige, indeed more zige than any rival. It is one of the most common phrases of abuse or dismissal: He has no zige to . . . speak for the democratic movement or to organize a conference or to lead a party or to testify to a congressional committee. Zige can be earned in various ways and played like a trump card in an elaborate game whose rules are necessarily vague. Wei’s eighteen years in jail would have awarded him more zige than Wang’s fourteen. But Wang could claim to have been an activist longer than Wei. The Li Yi Zhe poster went up when Wei was still an obscure electrician.

  There is also something less tangible and perhaps more traditionally Chinese that determines the degree of zige, something closer to the Confucian idea of moral character. This became clearer to me as I was standing outside the Rayburn Building on that wintry day in Washington and talking to the man in the crocodile shoes. His name was Dr. Wang Bingzhang (he had been a medical doctor in China), and his claim to zige was based on his having founded the first overseas Chinese democratic association in 1982. An ill-considered clandestine trip to China, which led to his expulsion, did nothing to enhance his zige, however. There was a slightly louche air about Wang Bingzhang, a hint of the smooth operator. After I talked to him the next day in the lobby of the Willard Hotel, he insisted on posing with me for a photograph, as though he were a politician on the stump.

  Dr. Wang prided himself on being a religious man. He was worried about the loss of “values” in China, about that notorious “spiritual vacuum.” And like so many others, he saw Christianity as the essential vehicle for “saving China.” He first saved himself by converting to Christianity while living in Toronto in the early 1980s. Without Christianity, he told me, people cannot control themselves. And that was the problem in China. People were corrupt. They co
uld not control their greed. All because of the destruction of traditional values by communism.

  There was, however, no mention of God in the pamphlet Dr. Wang pressed into my hand on the steps of the Rayburn Building. It was an open letter to the chairman of the House committee, written in awkward English and filled with the denunciatory phrases in which Communist Chinese is so rich. The letter explained why Wang Xizhe and Dr. Wang Bingzhang should be testifying to the U.S. Congress instead of the “ill-cultivated bubble-star” Wei Jingsheng. For they had supported Xu Wenli and his fellow members of the China Democracy Party, whereas the “bubble-star” had been consistently hostile to Xu. It was indeed true that Xu had received money from Dr. Wang. And Wei had criticized the fledgling party as a hopeless project: The timing was all wrong; it was bound to fail. In fact, Wei went further and saw sinister motives at work. Xu Wenli, he ventured, had probably made a secret deal with the Chinese government. After a year or two they would let him go to America, where he would use his dissident credentials to undermine Wei. Poor Xu, rotting in jail, was denounced by Wei as a government agent.

  Given the length of Xu’s jail sentence, this accusation was absurd. It was the kind of suspicion that might easily arise in the mind of a man who has spent eighteen years trying to outwit interrogators bent on his destruction. But one senses that the real quarrel here was not about spies or politics but about zige, character, recognition, mutual insults—in short, about who is to be boss.