Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  I had been in China during the summer after the bombing, and recalled the emotional intensity of those demonstrations, when the press was full of denunciations of U.S. “imperialist” aggression, recalling folk memories of older Chinese humiliations at the hands of alien powers. In Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan, I saw an exhibition of news photographs taken at the bombing site, with gory pictures of the Chinese “martyrs”—a number of journalists rumored to have been intelligence agents. A youngish man poked me in the ribs and silently pointed at a sheet tacked onto the wall. It was filled with scribbled comments by the irate “people” of Chengdu. He was especially anxious that I read two sentences, in English, which he tapped hard with his forefinger, still without saying a word: “Fucking NATO! Clinton is number-one war criminal!”

  And here we were watching a film that ridiculed these angry patriots. “Surely,” I said to Yang, “this cannot be shown publicly in China.” He chuckled and asked me why not. For political reasons, I said. Oh, but he wasn’t interested in politics. This wasn’t meant to be a political film, he said. It was about sex, about fucking, about coming to a climax. The frenzied demonstrators were no different from the porno actresses.

  The film reminded me of “underground” movies I had seen in Japan during the 1970s, when many former political radicals had turned to pornography as a desperate antidote to the disappointments of failed activism in the 1960s. Japan was becoming ever more prosperous, and there was less and less room for political alternatives: Dissent had become irrelevant; the students no longer cared. Nihilism filled the vacuum of exhausted idealism. Only raw sex still had some vaguely subversive meaning.

  China in 2000 was not Japan in the 1970s. But the mood of Yang’s short film—and indeed his photographs—reflected a certain aspect of life in Shenzhen. There is something skewed, even unhinged, about a society that encourages raw commercial enterprise but stifles any kind of thinking, any personal initiative, or any organized expression that departs from government dogma. Privately people can think and even say more or less what they want. Compared to Maoist times, this is progress. But in the public sphere, you have Party propaganda, with its periodic campaigns promoting the “theories” of the current leaders, and you have the semi-liberated marketplace. But there is no official forum for debate, no public expression of private views, except in Internet chat rooms.

  The marketplace is a wild and lawless place, fueled by corruption and sharp practices. Every time I came to Shenzhen, there were new revelations of scams in high places. In the summer of 2000, the Land Bureau of the Special Economic Zone government had virtually ceased to function, because too many officials, including vice-mayors, were being taken in for questioning. Vast bribes had been paid for building contracts. Government funds were used for stock-market speculation, making a few people enormously rich if it worked—and if it didn’t, well, the money just leaked away unnoticed. Huge state loans were pocketed by friends and relatives of Party bosses. The Hong Kong press was full of other stories too, of a more violent nature: workers who had been maimed by faulty machines fired without compensation; prostitutes, or their clients, found dead in shabby hotel rooms; “connected” businessmen having rivals arrested on trumped-up charges.

  The unintended consequence of a quasi–market economy is that some of these stories have appeared in the mainland press and on the Internet. Newspapers and magazines that do not rely on Party funds have to attract readers. Scandal is a universal lure, and there are few other checks on official abuse. Once in a while, if only for a limited time, a truly critical voice will slip through the net that normally shields government from public scrutiny.

  He Qinglian came south in 1988 to work as a journalist for the Shenzhen Legal Daily. Ten years later she was famous1. That Pitfalls of Modernization, her bestselling critique of the new China, appeared at all was more a function of official patronage than of the marketplace. After having been turned down by nine Chinese publishers, the book was rescued by Liu Ji, one of President Jiang Zemin’s chief advisers and one of the authors of his political “theories.” Communism is a bookish creed, so every Communist leader has to have his theory, usually published in heavy tomes and forced down the public throat in the form of tedious slogans. Jiang’s main theory is the “Three Representations,” meaning that the Party must be “represented”—that is, play a dominant role in the development of technology, culture, and economic progress. But Liu was more than a hack theorist. As vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, he made a cautious case for political reform. He Qinglian’s ideas fitted Jiang’s agenda. If she toned down some of her language and refrained from criticizing Party leaders directly, the book might strenghten Liu’s case at Jiang’s court. So with Liu’s backing, the book was published. The first printing of 100,000 copies sold out quickly, an astonishing number for a heavy essay on economics, full of graphs and statistics. But criticism, especially good criticism, is almost as sexy as scandal in a country starved of intellectual debate. After the official publication, more than 300,000 copies were sold in five pirated editions.

  He Qinglian’s book confirms, in academic prose, what the scandal papers can only hint at—that China’s capitalism is a dangerous hybrid of politics and criminality. She argues that power is the main commodity to be bought and sold. A small elite of bureaucrats and Party bosses use their positions to make vast amounts of money, mostly illegally, by squeezing a “simulated market,” which is only quasi-free, since political power2 “determines the allocation of resources but has no need to see to their efficient use.” She describes, among other things, how state officials buy natural resources at fixed government prices and sell them for huge profits on the private market and how they “privatize” a state industry by dismissing workers without pay and picking the enterprise clean of its assets. The result is a mafia economy, where the difference between political bosses and criminal dons is blurred, an economy where military officers profit from gambling and prostitution and gangsters lean on citizens to pay their taxes to local officials.

  This sounds like a leftist attack on capitalism. But He is not against economic reforms, or capitalism per se. She simply points out that without democratic institutions, a quasi–free market becomes a tool for institutionalized crime and oppression. This is close to what the students were saying in 1989. But He, in fact, comes from an earlier generation. Her first mentors were the former Red Guards who attacked “bureaucratism” in the 1970s. Her book is in some ways an updated version of the famous Li Yi Zhe wall poster put up in Guangzhou in 1974 by Wang Xizhe and Chen Yiyang, among others.

  He Qinglian writes about her debt to the former Red Guards, who learned their political lessons the hard way. She was a schoolgirl in Hunan when the Cultural Revolution raged and corpses of alleged class enemies came floating down the local river. While the brutality was shocking, she was excited by the idealism of young people going out to the countryside to build socialism with the peasants. After the worst violence was over, she was put to work on a rural railroad. A solitary girl of seventeen, she had little in common with the others on the construction site. She preferred to be alone with any books she could find. But reading was dangerous. When she picked up an anthology of Song- and Tang-dynasty literature, she was denounced for being a “feudal capitalist revisionist.” Desperate for some kind of intellectual rapport, she made friends among former Red Guards who were a few years older. She remembers these encounters with the intensity of a religious revelation. Her new friends talked through the night about the future of China, and discussed Diderot, Voltaire, and obscure nineteenth-century Russian social critics with giddy enthusiasm. It was from them, He recalls, that she learned the meaning of humanism. Most of them disappeared into obscurity. They were the “lost generation.” And the idealism of those terrible years faded with them. He’s book about the corruption of post-Mao China was, she says, an attempt to recapture some of the intensity she had felt in those early days, and to revive the idealistic
spirit of her lost comrades. Like them, she felt a patriotic duty to help China.

  He Qinglian had learned another lesson from the past. Chinese intellectuals had too often become servants of the state, and in most cases its victims. By the late 1970s, when she entered Fudan University in Shanghai to study economics, Deng Xiaoping had begun his economic reforms and the Soviet-style economics taught by He’s professors was hopelessly out of date. These professors were lost men, who had never had the freedom to think for themselves. But for a short while in the early 1970s, when everything was topsy-turvy, a certain kind of independence had been forged by a few young people as a result of the Cultural Revolution’s violent anarchy. City girls would go into the country filled with socialist idealism and end up being raped by brutalized peasants. Boys, who believed the Maoist slogans about fighting class enemies, found that Party bosses were the worst offenders against the common people. Disillusion, chaos, and a residue of idealism had made them question all dogmas and certainties. It is that spirit of independence, as well as the humanism, that He sees as her most precious inheritance from the lost generation.

  He’s voice, like that of other independent thinkers, could not be tolerated for long. When I arrived in Shenzhen in the summer of 2000, she had become the latest “liberal” to be silenced. Earlier in the year, President Jiang Zemin announced that “bourgeois liberals” and other thinkers who failed to heed “Party discipline” were to be purged. The editor of a liberal magazine was ousted, other magazines and websites were closed down, and several prominent members of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences lost their jobs after publishing articles advocating political reforms and human rights. One of them was He’s mentor, Liu Ji. The Internet was seen as a particular threat to Party dogma, so operators of several websites that posted unwelcome arguments or information were arrested. None of this was accompanied by violence. Times had changed to that extent. Repression was more subtle now.

  So it was with He Qinglian. She published a long article in a Hunan literary journal restating the arguments of her book, bluntly this time. Corruption was not just a matter of individual malfeasance, she said, but had become systemic. In a one-party state, the political elite cared only about its own interests. Corruption had become a “source of political capital.” And any attempt by those outside the Party elite to defend their interests through political parties, independent organizations, or public criticism was crushed. The result, she argued, was catastrophic for China. The environment was being systematically wrecked, national resources were plundered, and masses of people were turned into beggars or slaves. Without democratic reforms, there was no way to stop the country from being ruined by official mafiosi, who had already taken the precaution of sending their own children abroad.

  He’s article appeared in March 2000. This was the last time her voice would slip through the official net. Returning from a trip to America in June, she was told by her editor at the Shenzhen Legal Daily that she would no longer have her old position. She was demoted with a hefty salary cut, and her writing would no longer be published. The editor was embarrassed, but what could he do? It was all done very quietly. He Qinglian was famous. To arrest her would cause more trouble than it was worth. But a few words of intimidation slipped like poison into the ear of her boss were enough to snuff out one more critical voice in China.

  He Qinglian lives with her husband and child in a housing complex not far from the center of Shenzhen. I could not immediately find the right apartment, but saw an open door on her floor, leading into a virtually bare room. Three men were lolling about in their undershirts in a haze of cigarette smoke. I noticed the peculiar odor of cheap scent. I asked them if they knew where apartment 15G was. They looked me up and down, and one of the men lazily waved his hand at a door without saying a word.

  He, dressed in a Chinese-style shirt buttoned at the neck, asked me to come in, and offered a cup of delicious green tea. The sound of soupy Chinese folk melodies played on some kind of electronic organ came rather too loudly from the bedroom. He pointed at the wall separating her apartment from the men next door. “I don’t want them to hear what we are saying,” she said.

  I asked her who they were. She shrugged. “Man haowan,” she said, in a Hunanese accent—“great fun.” It was a favorite expression. She proudly showed me a message on the Internet praising her article. That too was “great fun.” The fact that her writing was going to be published in a British journal, the New Left Review, was also great fun. And so were the men next door. But she didn’t smile. She hummed nervously instead. Usually, when I asked her a question, she jumped up from her chair, saying, “I wrote about that very clearly,” and reached for a book or magazine article she had written. A dark, smallish woman with rather severe eyes peering through a pair of steel-framed glasses, He might seem arrogant. Perhaps she put a little bit too much stress on how often she was being interviewed these days by this famous foreign newspaper or that. There was a framed article on the wall, from an English-language news magazine, that featured her as one of the “rising stars” in Asia. She was proud of her reputation.

  It is always tempting to overrate the importance of intellectuals. They are the people most journalists and academics talk to in a country like China. And intellectuals have a keen sense of their own importance, fed, perversely, by the close attention paid to them by their authoritarian governments. Whatever her own sense of self-worth, He Qinglian writes very well about the role of intellectuals in China, whom she places among the losers after Deng’s reforms. They are not so much needed anymore as official scribes and ideologues now that ideology, largely bankrupt anyway, is no longer the main point. In the world of the quasi-marketplace, intellectuals count for less.

  He Qinglian still makes a strong case, however, for the importance of independent thinkers. What impressed her most during her visit to the United States was the freedom of people to criticize their government. I asked her what she thought of the dissidents abroad. Was Wei Jingsheng still a force? Did people read émigré writings, on the Internet perhaps? She said their influence on China was quite small. They had gained a kind of independence but had lost their public. Could she see herself living abroad? She said she would rather not. “Our voices in China are already so few. If I leave, that would mean one critic less.” She poured me another cup of green tea, humming under her breath. Then she glanced at the wall, with the framed article praising her as a “star,” the wall that separated her from the men who were watching her day and night, and said: “But then it isn’t only up to me, is it?” We exchanged e-mail addresses. “Great fun,” she said with sadness in her eyes as she showed me out the door.

  Almost exactly one year later, He escaped to the U.S., after security agents had broken into her apartment and taken away documents, her cell phone, and even photographs of He with foreign friends.

  He Qinglian, like Martin Lee, thinks the rule of law is impossible in a society without democratic institutions. Laws protect citizens from the arbitrary power of the state, and the best way to make sure that law functions in that way is to have a judiciary that is independent of the state and lawmakers who are accountable to the citizens who elect them. This is not the way things were traditionally done in China—or, indeed, until not so long ago, anywhere else. The Chinese ideal was rule by virtuous men, not by law. The law was an instrument for officials to control the people, which is why some argue that benevolent authoritarianism is more natural to China than democracy, that Jiang Zemin is more “Chinese” than “bourgeois liberals” such as He and Lee.

  In fact, however, Chinese thinkers reflected on the rule of law and how to limit the power of rulers long before bourgeois liberalism or communism were even thought of. Huang Zongxi, a seventeenth-century scholar, wrote a famous treatise3, entitled Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince, that somewhat resembles Machiavelli, even in its title. But more to the point, Huang was wrestling with some of the very same issues that exercise liberals in China today. Once,
he says, princes were unselfish guardians of the empire’s well-being, but that was long ago. Now, once a ruler had attained absolute power4, “he clubbed and flayed the bones and marrow of the empire, and he scattered the sons and daughters of the empire, in order to provide for his own sensual pleasure. He deemed it natural, and said that this was the profit from his own business.”

  And here is Huang’s solution5: “Should it be said that ‘there is only governance by men, not governance by law,’ my reply is that only if there is governance by law can there be governance by men. Since unlawful laws fetter men hand and foot, even a man capable of governing cannot overcome inhibiting restraints and suspicions.”

  By unlawful laws, Huang meant dynastic laws, which only served the interests of the imperial family. Rulers, in his view, should be subject to higher laws, devised by the ancient sages Confucius and Mencius and administered by learned mandarins. That Huang, a Han Chinese, resented being ruled by a dynasty of Manchus no doubt had something to do with this opinion, as did his desire to strengthen the position of scholar-officials like himself. But still, his ideas, which were to have a profound influence on the republican revolutionaries less than three hundred years later, illustrate that Chinese also understood how law could be the most effective tool to limit the inevitable excesses of absolute power.