Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  The coffee shop where we met was noisy. Rock music, clinking glasses, and a buzz of conversation made it difficult to hear exactly what Li was saying. He spoke fast, sometimes in English, sometimes in Chinese, and drank several cans of Budweiser in quick succession. Li had the kind of transparent self-regard I often noticed in active Chinese men. He liked to make claims that he was “the only one” to do this or that. He had the “biggest database” of e-mail addresses in China. Nobody else was reaching out to China the way he was. The stars among the exiled dissidents, Wei Jingsheng, Chai Ling, Liu Qing, they were all pretty useless. As I made notes, he smiled with satisfaction. I asked him whether he was a Christian. He said he was not. With his background in science, how could he be a believer? So was it Professor Fang who had first turned his mind to politics? No, that was not it either.

  As a biochemistry student in Nanjing during the early 1980s, Li had come across a book that changed his life. Megatrends, written by John Naisbitt, the American futurist guru of global networking, was strictly for “internal” distribution among Party cadres. Somehow Li managed to get hold of it. Before turning to Naisbitt, Li told me he had been an avid reader of Victorian fiction—he mentioned Jane Eyre—and a keen student of Chinese sexual customs. But through Naisbitt he was introduced to the idea of a world without frontiers, with every citizen connected through the wonders of technology. This, Li said, “really blew my mind.”

  Like many students of the Tiananmen generation, Li had benefited from Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. Born in 1963, he has only hazy memories of Maoist persecution, but he can still recall his confusion when he saw his grandmother being spat at and forced to clean the streets. Her sin was to have married a landowner before the revolution. Because of this, the family lost all social benefits, and Li’s mother cursed the old woman for their misfortunes. But by the time Li himself went to school, things had become easier, and he graduated from university without any trouble in 1984. Instead of taking a government-assigned job, however, Li decided to apply for postgraduate studies in Shanghai. That is when he began to read John Naisbitt, as well as books about the May Fourth Movement and by intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s.

  When the Tiananmen Movement began, Li was teaching chemistry in Beijing. He went to the Square more as a sympathetic observer than an active participant. On the evening of June 3, he left the Square to go home. Only hours later, when he realized how serious the street battles between soldiers and demonstrators had become, he tried to return but could not press his way through the crowds. He heard gunshots and screaming. Suddenly there were people lying on the ground, covered in blood. He managed to load some of them onto pushcarts so they could be rushed off to a hospital.

  Li is modest about his role in 1989. He does not claim to have been a leader. His activism began only after he had managed to get a research job at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and joined an organization of overseas Chinese scholars. It was there that he found a way to marry his love of technology with his interest in politics, or what he calls “humanities.” While taking part in discussion groups on the Internet, he noticed that the most active participants were scientists, who were experts at using the Internet but had little idea of politics. In 1996 the discussion groups began to attract people from China, too. That is when Li decided to follow Naisbitt’s ideas and use the Internet to carry on, as he puts it, “the unfinished revolution” of 1989.

  It is a curious paradox of contemporary Chinese politics that Beijing insists on one China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, even as it tries to stop people in the various parts of China from communicating with one another through magazines, newspapers, television, and now the Internet. Beijing faces a dilemma: It wants China to be “wired,” to become a modern economy, while at the same time wishing to restrict the information that new technology can provide. This problem is hardly new: how to gain knowledge from barbarians without being polluted by their ideas. The phrase used at the end of the nineteenth century was ti-yong, “essence” and “practice”—that is, Chinese learning for the spirit and Western learning for practical use. Chinese learning used to mean Confucianism. Now it means socialism with Chinese characteristics. However, it is no longer the barbarians who are most feared but other Chinese.

  In a perfect reprise of the nineteenth-century ti-yong debates, President Jiang Zemin warned against spreading “sham science” and “unhealthy trash,” while also talking about “positive use” of the Internet to promote “healthy information.”

  So far, in 2001, about 14 million people in China have access to computers, but the number just about doubles each year. One computer has many users, especially in such places as Internet cafés, so it is impossible to say how many mainland Chinese go on-line. By the end of 2002, it should be more than 30 million. Since e-commerce is still undeveloped in China, where credit cards barely exist, most Internet users are interested in other types of information. Many are scientists and entrepreneurs, who look for technical or business news. This is leavened with the kind of thing mainland newspapers now increasingly offer their readers, to sweeten the wooden propaganda: movie star gossip, local scandals, or lifestyle advice. Unbiased news about Taiwan or Tibet cannot be found on official websites, and political criticism, though not unheard of, especially in the academic corners of cyberspace, is limited. And yet information is exchanged in chat rooms, and critical voices are heard. Banned writers post articles on websites, which might be shut down, but they are swiftly replaced by others. How can the government make sure that millions of people limit themselves only to what it wants them to know? The point of the World Wide Web, after all, is that it is open to everyone. The answer is that the government cannot. But there are various ways it can try. One method is to make it so expensive and burdensome to get access to an Internet service provider that only a trusted few can afford it. But for the equivalent of less than one U.S. dollar, anyone can use the Internet for an hour at an Internet café, or wangba.

  Around 1996, when the Internet began to take off in China, you still had to fill in complicated identification forms and present police records to show you were an obedient citizen, even in Internet cafés. You had to swear not to read, reproduce, or transmit material that was pornographic or damaging to public order or state security. Damage to state security includes anything that might encourage “division of the country” (meaning Tibetan or Taiwanese independence) and is, of course, forbidden, as is the spreading of “falsehoods.” It is up to the government to decide what is true or false. This is why readers of Li’s VIP Reference News are advised not to send it on to others by e-mail. Still, there are free service providers in China that do not require much paperwork. And the rules on registration in cafés are rarely enforced.

  A more serious threat to freedom of information is the so-called firewall. By making it illegal to log on to the global Internet through other than official Chinese portals, the government tries to block unwelcome websites. The official networks connect with the Internet through one gateway, which is controlled by the Ministry of Information Industry. Control over foreign websites is spotty, however. Anyone who speaks English and can afford the price of an expensive local call and a cup of coffee can usually log on to foreign newspaper sites and get all the news in the world. What the government would really like is an insulated Chinese Internet, which has all the advantages of speedy communications (good for business, as well as the security agencies) but protects the purity of the Chinese spirit behind an electronic wall.

  But the Chinese wall is full of holes. One way to penetrate it is through so-called proxy servers—that is, overseas servers that can bypass the Chinese gateway. Proxy-server addresses are passed around among friends, and sometimes even provided at Internet cafés. And no matter how hard teams of technicians from the Public Security Bureau try to do so, they cannot block all of them all the time, for there are simply too many. And since many of these servers are connected to overseas universities and other institutio
ns that help keep Chinese scientists up-to-date, it would harm the national interest to close them all down anyway.

  Spamming, or sending e-mails to a vast number of people at the same time, is a technique normally used by advertisers. Li Hongkuan uses it to transmit his VIP Reference News, which is, naturally, a banned website, but he has collected about 250,000 e-mail addresses in China, some of them from businessmen, who swap data with him. Spamming is not a method everyone approves of. At least with proxy servers, a person can choose what to read. But spamming has great advantages. Though e-mails can be intercepted by the government, and read, most of them get through, and Li makes things harder for the censors by daily changing the address from which he sends them. Recipients can honestly claim that the material was unsolicited. E-mails between individuals can also be made illegible to third parties by encryption, ensuring privacy by encoding and decoding messages. The best the government can do is to intimidate potential readers by making examples of a few.

  In March 1998, Lin Hai, a thirty-year-old computer company owner in Shanghai, was arrested in his apartment by twenty plainclothes police officers. His computers, phones, printers, business cards, and books were confiscated, and his wife, Xu Hong, was briefly detained as well. After sitting in jail for almost a year, Lin was sentenced to another two years. His alleged crime was “incitement to undermine the government” by giving thirty thousand e-mail addresses to VIP Reference News. Lin was not a dissident, but he had been unable to sell his addresses to legitimate businesses. His wife made the reasonable point that “e-mail addresses are public information, just like telephone numbers.” But that was to miss the point. Lin’s case was an example of what Chinese call “killing a chicken to scare the monkeys.”

  In September 1999, Qi Yanchen, an economist, was arrested at his house in a small city in Hebei province. No one is quite sure what prompted the arrest. But printouts were found in his office of VIP Reference News, and he is said to have been working on a book, entitled The Collapse of China, which he had planned to distribute through the Internet. Qi might also have been involved with an electronic magazine linked to a banned, nongovernmental organization in Hong Kong. He was known for his strong views on the environment and political reform. In any case, Qi was charged with breaking a law that forbids communication with “foreign individuals or organizations.”

  Then, in the summer of 2000, a schoolteacher was arrested for posting criticism of the government from an Internet café in Sichuan, named Silicon Valley Internet Coffee. He was charged with “incitement to overthrow the government.” Another man in Sichuan, who ran a website that tracked down missing persons, including many abducted children, was jailed for having articles on his website about the June 4 massacre. His last message was: “Good-bye, police have come to take me away for questioning.”

  But these desperate measures cannot stop thousands of others from surfing forbidden areas in cyberspace. Nor can the government stop people from talking to one another on the Internet, wherever they might physically be. New religions, like Falun Gong, are not the only organizations that use the Internet; new political parties do the same. That is how Xu Wenli and others managed to organize their China Democracy Party in 1999 without the government knowing about it. Like Falun Gong, the CDP has been driven underground, but that underground is “wired.” CDP supporters everywhere, in China and outside, remain in touch and could organize again at once.

  Chen Ziming, a well-known dissident in Beijing, who set up a highly respected independent think tank for political and economic reform in the 1980s, was arrested in 1989 as a so-called black hand behind the Tiananmen demonstrations. He was jailed for six years but now lives at home, under permanent house arrest. He cannot speak to people on the telephone, receive visitors, or even go for a walk. He can only read, talk to his wife, watch television, work out on an exercise machine, and use his computer. Cut off from the world physically, he is still linked to the world electronically. E-mail is his lifeline.

  Access to news or electronic links alone will not bring democracy to China. New technology can be used to good or bad purpose, for linking dissident groups and for invading their privacy. But an authoritarian system based on secrecy and national isolation becomes vulnerable once the walls that contain the secrets come down. The myth of one China, where people live in harmony and dissent is denounced as “anti-Chinese,” has been shattered by the electronic revolution. For the democratic cacophony of voices posted on the Internet shows clearly that China already exists as a pluralist society, not only in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but in cyberspace. And however much Beijing tries to stop it, mainland Chinese are now members of that society, too. All that remains is to bring it down to earth.

  Part II

  Greater China

  Chapter 1

  Chinese Disneyland

  Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is a post-Maoist model of the Chinese future. To lapsed Communist Chinese rulers, heirs to the scientistic myths of May 4, 1919, and the autocracy of imperial China, a society that manages to combine the riches of capitalism with the harsh discipline of a one-party authoritarian state would seem progressive and reassuringly traditional at the same time. That, and the superb food, are the main reasons I keep returning there. Singapore gives you an idea of “China,” reflected in a distorting mirror. Yet this remarkable Singaporean creation was the work of men who were not all ethnically Chinese, were largely ignorant of Chinese history, culture, or tradition, and whose chief architect was an English-educated barrister, who fought all his life against communism. The result owes little to Karl Marx, a bit more to Lenin, and a great deal to the accumulated instincts of mandarins, bureaucrats, and Party cadres who have ruled for centuries in Confucius’s name.

  It is not so easy, however, to define the Chineseness of Singapore or of its main ruler, now senior minister, with precision, for it is distorted by another tradition, whose roots are Western, not Oriental. Harry Lee Kuan Yew comes from a typical colonial Straits-Chinese family. His grandfather, a gentleman of the old school, who never took off his collar and tie in the noonday sun, thought the British were always right about everything. And Harry, who adored his grandfather, was sent to an English-language school to be equipped, as he put it in his memoirs1, entitled, rather grandly, The Singapore Story, “to go to an English university in order that I could then be an educated man—the equal of any Englishman, the model of perfection.”

  Lee’s obsession with discipline and cleanliness, and his horror of tropical sloth and native corruption, reflects his colonial education. And so, perhaps, does his conviction that power is the monopoly of superior men, whose virtues should be an example to lesser breeds, convictions that match older Chinese ideals of scholar-officials, selected on the basis of their rote learning of Confucian classics. They were thought to embody a higher morality, based on an orthodoxy that it was their duty to instill in the common people.

  Singapore’s superior men no longer learn the classics; they are technocrats, who think in terms of human “digits,” to use one of the senior minister’s phrases. Their superiority is less the product of Confucian virtues than of a perverted rationalism or technocratic skill. But they are still selected through examinations that test their political orthodoxy as well as their academic learning. To enter a university in Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s, a student needed to have a “suitability certificate,” to prove that his family had the correct political leanings. Like the Chinese Communist Party, Lee’s People’s Action Party (PAP) seeks to control every aspect of society—not just the way people behave, but how they think—and it cannot accept the idea, let alone the necessity, of loyal opposition. Since mandarins or cadres are held to be virtuous and their rule benevolent, critics by definition are morally deficient, and thus must be eradicated, lest they infect the healthy social organism.

  In theory, in imperial China, even rulers had to obey the moral dogmas laid down by the ancient sages, and if they departed from Confucian ethics, it was the duty of scho
lar-officials to show rulers the error of their ways. Singaporean officials, too, accept criticism, and sometimes even say they welcome it, but they call it “feedback” or “constructive criticism.” By this they mean technocratic advice, filtered through the PAP, on how to make the government system work even more efficiently. What they do not want is criticism of the way they use the system to keep themselves in power.

  Nothing is more Chinese about Singapore than its punishments. Caning offenders and minor criminals is a legacy of the British empire as much as the Chinese tradition of corporal punishment. But the use of public confession is an old Confucian practice. It shows that the critic has submitted to orthodoxy. It has to be imposed to enforce obedience or, as Lee would have it, “social cohesion.” The orthodoxy of Lee’s Singapore, sometimes called Asian values, since it cannot be identified as “Chinese” in a multiracial state, is that collective interests, as defined by the government, come before individual rights and that liberal democracy and human rights are Western “values,” which do not apply to Asians.

  What confuses the outsider in Singapore at first is the institutional layer of Britishness that lies on the surface: the constant talk about the rule of law, the rituals of judicial and parliamentary procedure, even the style of the government-controlled English-language press, which reflects the priggishness—though not the quality or the relative independence—of the 1950s BBC. Bit by bit, however, Lee’s PAP has removed the more liberal aspects of British institutions: trial by jury, freedom of the press, adversarial politics. You might say, then, that Lee Sinified the Raj, even though he did it in the English language and his main adversaries were Chinese speakers. He imbued the most authoritarian aspects of British colonial rule with an autocratic Chinese spirit.