Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  What the tour guides fail to mention is that much of this is a façade, a kind of theater of religious freedom, orchestrated by the Chinese authorities. My banker friend in Lhasa exaggerated when he said that all monks were government stooges. Some only pay lip service to official propaganda. Some are “unofficial” monks, who slip through the net of state control. Many monks and nuns spend many years in prison. And even the official monks, if the time were ripe for open rebellion, might well prove to be unreliable government employees. Still, the government’s aim is to control every aspect of Tibetan Buddhism and make it as colorful and lifeless as those official jamborees of minority peoples dancing in unison in Tiananmen Square.

  This macabre theater often verges on the absurd. When the popular tenth Panchen Lama died in 1989, the reincarnation of his soul had to be found in the body of a child. There are set ways of going about this. High Lamas scan a sacred lake for signs of the reincarnated soul. They blow on conch shells, pray to the embalmed body of the late Panchen Lama. Little boys are vetted and presented with possessions of the late Lama, to provoke signs of recognition. And once the incarnated Lama has been found, the Dalai Lama must endorse him. But since the Chinese authorities refused to recognize the authority of the Dalai Lama, they decided that they themselves would be the final arbiters of divine rebirth and cut the Dalai Lama out altogether. So the abbot of Tashilhunpo was told to find a suitable reincarnation. This he set out to do. Prayers were said, omens scrutinized, and names collected, but in the end the abbot’s loyalty to the Dalai Lama proved to be stronger than his political reliability to the Chinese.

  A plan was made for the abbot to pass on a name to the Dalai Lama, who would then endorse him in secret, after which the candidate would be revealed to the Chinese authorities. Then the Dalai Lama could claim to his people that the Chinese candidate had in fact been his choice to begin with. This way, Beijing would be happy and the Dalai Lama’s authority would be intact. It was a clever ruse. But things went wrong. Messages between the Dalai Lama and the abbot failed to get through, and the Dalai Lama announced the name of his candidate before the Chinese had a chance to do so. The Chinese were furious. The abbot was arrested for his treachery. The young boy, blessed by the Dalai Lama, was kidnapped. Monks at Tashilhunpo were thrown into jail. And the Communist authorities, quite absurdly, accused the Dalai Lama of acting “contrary to the dignified and deeply felt religious rituals of Buddhism.”7

  It was a most remarkable situation. Marxist-Leninists from Beijing posed as defenders of the Tibetan faith, and names of the official, Chinese-backed candidates were wrapped in silk and put in a sacred urn. Then handpicked Tibetan monks ceremoniously divined the Panchen Lama’s incarnation, who happened to be the son of two loyal Communist Party members. His photograph was distributed for display all over the Tibetan areas. Yet few Tibetans believe in him. They might pray to his image, but as one Tibetan told me: “They can make us show any picture they want. The real thing is inside our heads.”

  The tragedy is that politics in Tibet has come to this: religious charades played out in a battle for sovereignty and authority. The almost purely religious definition of the Tibetan nation precludes more secular ways to establish a freer, more open society, so Tibetans have to choose between Chinese-style modernization, as brutal communism or brutal capitalism, and government by high priests. Of course, many priests, including the Dalai Lama, claim that they want democracy. But when the highest temporal authority is also the center of metaphysical truth, freedom is impossible.

  Some Tibetan aristocrats, who had been educated in India and were aware of this problem even before the Chinese revolution, sometimes backed the Chinese Communists to free their country from what they saw as a corrupt theocracy. I met a Tibetan poet in Lhasa, whose father was a nobleman educated at a British school in Darjeeling. When he came home in the 1930s, he was appalled by the corruption and backwardness he found and became one of the first Tibetans to join the Communist Party. Not that it helped him during the Maoist storms. He was arrested, tortured in front of his family, and sent to do hard labor in a remote area of China. Soon after that, his heart gave out. His son, the poet, makes a living translating Tibetan poems into Chinese.

  Late one afternoon, when the sun was about to set, a chill wind began to blow around the Tashilhunpo. I was told by a young monk that there would be some “activity” at six o’clock. So I waited, with Tibetan pilgrims, covered in dust and grime, and tourists, armed with cameras. Soon the sounds of long horns and clashing cymbals echoed from the whitewashed walls. An elderly monk with a huge yellow hat, like a great cockscomb, appeared at the head of about twenty monks. They went up to a bundle of straw outside the main gate tied together with rope, rather like a stake for a public execution. After more banging, a young monk was handed a bow and arrow. He shot several arrows into the straw. The old monk handed him a torch. It was lit and the straw went up in flames, leaving a black smudge on the street after it had burned out.

  “What was all that about?” a plump German woman asked her husband, who had been recording the event on his video camera. “Something symbolic,” he answered with great authority.

  He was right. It was a symbolic driving out of evil demons. But who were the demons?

  Chapter 4

  A Deer Is a Deer

  In the late summer of 2000, a poet named Bei Ling was arrested in Beijing. Bei Ling, a genial figure in round glasses and a ponytail, was on a visit from Boston, Massachusetts, where he edits Tendency, a highbrow literary journal with a refreshing cosmopolitan perspective. It features interviews with international writers and poets and articles by and about dissidents in the former Soviet empire, such as Václav Havel, as well as works by Chinese authors, some of whom are banned in the People’s Republic of China.

  Although his sympathies are with the dissidents in China, Bei Ling is not really a political activist. His crime was decribed as “illegal commercial activities,” that is to say, he had printed the latest issue of his journal in Beijing, because it was cheaper there, and distributed a thousand-odd free copies. The contents of this issue were not particularly provocative, except perhaps for a photograph of Wang Dan, the student leader in 1989. Bei Ling was to have attended a party in Beijing, but failed to turn up. The police got to him first.

  Luckily for Bei Ling, his friends and contacts in the West were able to make a fuss. Famous authors wrote angry pieces in The New York Times. Keeping him in jail was more trouble to the Chinese authorities than it was worth. Li Peng was about to visit New York. So after a week in detention, Bei Ling was released and sent back to the United States. His family was told to pay the police a considerable fee to clinch the deal. This was business as usual.

  In the grander scale of things, it was an event of small importance. Yet it raised an interesting question: Why should a powerful regime, protected by a huge network of secret police and security agencies, a regime that had successfully crushed all attempts at organized opposition, be afraid of a minor poet and editor of an obscure émigré literary journal?

  The answer lies in the Communist Party’s paranoia about critical writers but also in the nature of what Václav Havel once called the post-totalitarian system. Such a system is different, in his view, from a classic dictatorship, which rules mainly through brute force. The post-totalitarian system will use violence if necessary, but prefers to cloak its coercive power in a quasi-religious ideology, a tissue of falsehoods, which offer an answer and an explanation for everything. These answers, however, are usually the opposite of the truth.8 In Havel’s words, “Government by bureaucracy is called popular government . . . the arbitrary use of power is called observing the legal code . . . the expansion of imperial power is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views . . .”

  This is of course also how a totalitarian or Stalinist system operates, and the distinctive quality
of “post-totalitarianism” is not always clear. Perhaps Havel means that post-totalitarian subjects have internalized the official lies so effectively that force is no longer necessary. In that sense, China is not yet a post-totalitarian society; violence is still used extensively, especially in such areas as Tibet or against members of unofficial religious groups. But China is post-totalitarian in another sense. The Communist government no longer tries to control every aspect of people’s lives. There is a certain amount of freedom now to choose a job or a marriage partner or even, in larger cities, a “lifestyle.” Young urban people enjoy a sexual freedom that was unheard of only a decade or so ago. It is almost as if energies that might be turned toward politics are deliberately channeled toward a giddy hedonism—the age-old formula of bread and circuses.

  And yet much of what Havel says applies to China, too. His point about the center of power being the center of truth is as true today as it was in many periods before the Communists came to power. When the president of the People’s Republic of China says that censorship is essential because otherwise the press (or the Internet) will disseminate falsehoods and “confuse people’s minds,” he speaks like a typical exponent of Confucian authoritarianism. Perhaps he even believes it. But communism added a perverse twist to this kind of thinking. Havel again: “Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”

  People need not believe these lies. In private they may even say so. But in public they must behave as though they do. They must, in Havel’s phrase, “live within a lie.” Those who refuse to conform to this apparently simple, even comforting, but actually most cruel form of human degradation, who choose, in other words, to “live in truth,” are ostracized, bullied, deprived, and spit out of the system. This is essential for the system to survive, for once the lies are publicly exposed and the emperor is naked for all to see, only brute force remains as a method of control. And no force, however brutal, can be up to the task, in the long run, of controlling 1.3 billion Chinese.

  The problem with China is that the old lies no longer work. They are simply too absurd. When the government’s answer to the corruption produced by its own economic policies is to order people to redouble their study of Marxism-Leninism, even the most trusted cadres are hard-pressed to stay within the lies. And that is why the authorities appear so panic-stricken in their attempts to stop anyone from living in truth, even a rather innocuous poet who behaves as though he were in Boston instead of Beijing. He must be punished to discourage others who might do the same.

  I arrived in Beijing in the summer of 1999, the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen demonstrations. It seemed a good time to be reaching the final destination of my journeys. The truth about June 4 was still a smoldering political issue that could yet explode. I found that people were ready to talk about the past in private conversation. But the government was nervous about public displays of grief or anger. The capital was more heavily policed than usual. On the anniversary of the June 4 massacre, Tiananmen Square itself was sealed off from the public with police barricades.

  Beijing is the most public city in China, public not in a democratic but in an official sense—a city given to massive, mostly state-driven occasions. It is a political city, with its monumental government buildings, Mao’s mausoleum, its high-rises with phony Chinese-style roofs, its Forbidden City, and, of course, at “the heart of China,” Tiananmen, “the largest square in the world,” center of the new Chinese empire and the place of power worship and occasional protest. Beijing is all that, and at the same time it is a city of dark and intricate intimacy, a city of walled compounds, narrow lanes, and whispered conversations.

  I have come across many Chinese who expressed a dislike of Beijing because it is “too political.” Power, not commerce, is the business of Beijing. Just as Shenzhen was built as a monument to commerce, Beijing was planned as a monument to imperial power. Few capital cities make such a show of official authority. The thick red walls of the Forbidden City still project the majesty of the Ming and Qing emperors. Scanning the vast expanse of Tiananmen Square, all 444,000 square meters of it, the Stalinist-fascist Great Hall of the People at the west, the Museum of History and Revolution at the east, and the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall at the south, one gets the impression of a regime of provincial upstarts, trying not just to live up to the splendor of its imperial predecessors but to outdo it, by building on an even larger, more grandiose scale.

  Official Beijing is a monument to its lies. The Great Hall of the People belongs no more to the people than the Forbidden City did in the past. The quasi-religious cult of Chairman Mao is encrusted in official myths. The cheesy corpse of the late chairman, lying in its embalmed state in the middle of Tiananmen Square, may not even be the body of the great dictator but a wax effigy.

  The greatest lie of all is something that cannot be spoken. A taboo lies at the center of Beijing. What happened around Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, is officially dismissed as an “incident.” As soon as the killings were done, tank tracks were covered in asphalt, bloodstains scrubbed off the streets, and bullet-scarred walls whitewashed. Not a trace remains. Ten years later, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji told foreign reporters that he had forgotten all about June 4. Nobody knows how many victims there were. Nobody is allowed to know. Their names were never released. Their relatives have to suffer in silence, as though they were criminals, or outcasts, with a shameful secret. And the mere publication of a photograph in a literary journal of one of the student leaders gets you arrested.

  To live in this lie is humiliating. One day, during my 1999 visit, I had tea in the apartment of a literary critic, a friend of a friend. His study was a murky grotto piled with books, papers, and literary journals, some banned, some from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Zhou, as I shall call him, had the cultivated bohemian look of many Chinese (or Japanese) intellectuals, vaguely redolent of Paris in the 1920s: long, greasy hair, nicotine-stained teeth, sandals, and a drinker’s paunch. He told me about his daughter, who at twelve, was too young to remember the Beijing Massacre.

  She knew nothing about what had happened ten years before. How could she? The events of June 4 were never mentioned at school. Some of her teachers had participated in the demonstrations and might have lost friends in the killings, but they have to remain silent. Instead, they teach the children lies: that the Party is always good, that the army loves the people, and that American imperialists must be resisted, because foreigners want China to stay weak. The most agonizing thing is that parents, who know better, are not able to discuss June 4 with their children either, or not in any way that might land them in trouble at school.

  Zhou lit up a cigarette, shrugged, and said: “In any case, the children aren’t interested. Chinese kids quickly acquire a sharp sense of what might get them in trouble. They develop fine antennae for unmentionable subjects. They know that being interested in sensitive historical topics is not good for them, so they don’t ask questions. And that means the parents don’t have to answer them.”

  It was one of the saddest things I heard in Beijing. The worst humiliation of having to live in a lie is that it forces people to share their oppressors’ cover-up. It makes them accomplices, for, as Václav Havel puts it, by living in the lie, “individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”

  I was in Shanghai a week or so before I met Zhou in Beijing. A young woman, who was highly educated and had taken part in the student demonstrations of 1989, took me to an Internet café. It was a well-lit place, decorated with plastic flowers and movie posters. Rows of young people sat at long tables, working the computers and drinking coffee under the gaze of Madonna and Brad Pitt. There was no sound except for the whir
ring and screeching noises of machines going on-line. We surfed the Net together, my friend and I. Out of careless curiosity, which I later regretted, I logged on to an English-language website—often blocked—called China News Digest, which featured a BBC story on the Beijing Massacre, with pictures of dying students, PLA soldiers firing, and portraits of Wang Dan, Chai Ling, and others. My friend stiffened, perhaps in apprehension, and then said: “You foreigners always want to find bad things to say about China.” In the presence of an outsider, the government’s shame had become her shame, too.

  It is always a moving experience to come across people who refuse to live in the lie. It can happen at the most unexpected moments. I took a taxi to the Beijing Art Museum one morning. The driver was a large man in his forties, with a sad, horsy face. We passed a low nineteenth-century, gray-brick, Chinese-style building. I asked him what it was. This question unleashed an extraordinary tirade.

  It had belonged, he said, to one of Sun Yat-sen’s ministers, a deeply corrupt man. But not as corrupt as the bunch in power today. The driver banged the dashboard of his Volkswagen and said: “Things are much worse now than during the late Qing dynasty. Fuck your mother! China is like a huge prison. There is no progress here, because of our history of dictatorships, one after the other, one after the other!”