Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China

by Jianying Zha

  It’s a sharp insight. When Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize in 2000, both the Chinese foreign ministry and the official Chinese Writers Association issued angry protestations, calling it a decision based on politics rather than literary merit. Having lived in Europe for over a decade and become a French citizen, Gao is seen as a dissident in exile. At the breaking of the news, Wang was contacted, but he was away and out of reach. In later interviews, he said his own attitude differed from the official stance. Selected by Northern Europeans, Wang said, the Nobel Prize cannot and should not have any obligation to satisfy Chinese standards. Therefore, to worship, envy, denigrate, or oppose it are all meaningless. Instead of criticizing the Nobel Prize, he said, why don’t we try to improve our own literary prizes? Or better yet, try to focus on literature itself and produce better works?

  While many Chinese writers bemoaned the selection of Gao, whom they do not consider a great writer, Wang has never criticized him. The two men had been friendly in the 1980s and admired one another’s work. Gao wrote rave reviews of Wang’s fiction, praising its inventiveness and humor. Wang was enthusiastic when Gao published an introductory book on modernist literature. They both fought the ideological clutch on Chinese writing, and they were detested and attacked by the same apparatchiks. They were trench mates in the 1980s Chinese culture wars.

  Another little-known fact has to do with the circumstances of Gao’s departure from China. In 1988, a West German organization invited Gao to visit for six months, but the Chinese side raised questions about his eligibility, and the Culture Ministry official in charge of foreign travel approval put the case on hold—until Minister Wang intervened. Wang gave the green light. Gao left China and never returned.

  To the young Chinese bloggers today, the 1980s is almost ancient history. They are not likely to be aware of or interested in these happenings in the past. And so in the eyes of many young irreverent radicals on the Internet, Wang seems no different than any other old conservatives defending the Chinese Party and all the writers who sold out to the regime.

  Recently, proving that Wang’s insight about “the Nobel pattern” goes beyond literature, a Chinese dissident writer was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Liu Xiaobo, a literary professor turned human-rights activist, was sentenced to eleven years in prison in December 2009 on charges of “inciting subversion of state power.” Liu’s main “crime” was co-authoring “Charter 08,” a prodemocracy manifesto that called on the Communist Party to enact political reforms and uphold the constitutional rights of Chinese citizens. The document was first signed by 303 Mainland intellectuals (I was among them) and then by thousands of Chinese around the world. The heavy sentence shocked all of us and outraged the international community. A few months later, several former Nobel laureates nominated Liu: Václav Havel, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama.

  The news made me think of Wang. It is not just because of his remark on “the Nobel pattern” but also because of an essay he wrote many years ago, in the heat of a literary debate, in which he dismissed Liu Xiaobo as a fame-mongering opportunist. The circumstances were different, and Wang was not writing about Liu’s political action. Still, the essay was rather famous at the time and has deeply damaged Wang’s reputation among liberal Chinese intellectuals. One of them is Zhu Xueqin, a Shanghai historian who has since become a prominent public intellectual. Zhu wrote a caustic essay about Wang at the time, and told me recently that his views haven’t changed. After the Frankfurt controversy, Zhu sent me a fresh essay. It commemorated Gu Zhun, a persecuted yet fiercely independent thinker during the Cultural Revolution. But Wang came up toward the end of the essay: condemning present Chinese literature as evading reality, Zhu called Wang’s Frankfurt speech a shameless lie.

  The essay put me in a melancholy mood: I have known Wang and Zhu for many years, and I am fond of both. But they are definitely not fond of one another. So I e-mailed Zhu to say that my opinion of Wang is different from his. After some hesitation, I also e-mailed Wang to express my chagrin at the recent controversy, and attached Zhu’s essay.

  Both men replied promptly. Zhu’s message read: “I know your opinion about Wang is different and that’s why I sent you my piece. It wouldn’t be interesting if we had the same views.”

  Wang’s message read: “No problem. Whatever. I don’t have time to worry about this sort of thing, and I’m long used to it. Thanks.”

  Two months later, Liu Xiaobo was sentenced. I couldn’t help wondering about Wang’s reaction. I e-mailed him again. This time, there was no reply.

  I first met Wang Meng in the early 1990s, not long after his departure from the Culture Ministry. Despite his national stature, I sensed a vulnerability about the man, which I speculated had to do with the curious situation he was in then. He was loathed by people at both ends of the Chinese ideological spectrum. He was the only Chinese minister who had refused to visit “the heroic soldiers wounded in crushing counterrevolutionary rioters” on Tiananmen Square. Yet, because he had taken his stand in the meekest possible fashion (he pleaded illness), it earned him little admiration among the rebels. Hard-liners and dissidents alike had a simple question: are you with us or against us? Wang had no simple answer. Shaped by some of the most turbulent decades of twentiethcentury political history, he found an abiding principle in an aversion to turbulence.

  The courtier was once a rebel. Wang Meng was born in 1934, in Beijing, to parents who had arrived from a rural backwater in Hebei province. When he was three, the Japanese invaded China and occupied Beijing, and Wang remembers having to bow to the bayoneted Japanese guards at the city gates. But the most painful aspect of his childhood was the shadow of poverty and the constant battles between his parents, who were trapped in an unhappy, volatile marriage. His father, having studied in Beijing and Japan, became enamored with all things modern and Western. A college teacher and a dreamy idealist, he was prone to grand speeches yet incompetent in practical matters and office politics. As his career foundered, the large family dependent on him struggled with debt and hunger. As a boy Wang sometimes ate “glue”—boiled flour goo—to crush hunger. There were horrendous instances of domestic violence: in a fight, his widowed aunt would pour a pot of hot green-bean soup onto his father, and his drunken father would pull down his pants to embarrass the women.

  Wang was the eldest son and was a brilliant student. Winning essay and debate competitions and enjoying tuition waivers, he was loved by his teachers and everyone in his family. But secretively, the sensitive, precocious boy was reading leftist books and was enthralled by radical ideas about social revolution. His early leftist inclinations, he joked later, were revealed in a third-grade poem:If I were a tiger,

  I would devour rich people . . .

  Soon, the underground Communist agents recruited him, and he set to work as a middle-school agitator. The work was dangerous but exhilarating, giving him a new sense of purpose in life. He was barely fourteen when the Party accepted him as a member. A year later, the Party took over China.

  To this day Wang likes to insist that, for a young person, nothing could be more exciting and beautiful than experiencing a victorious revolution. “From this day on, the Chinese people have stood up!” Mao Zedong declared on the rostrum of Tiananmen Square and the entire nation rejoiced. The purity and innocent euphoria of the first days of the People’s Republic was among the dearest of Wang’s memories. He was addicted to the passionate rallies, the dancing parades, the comradely meetings, and the songs they sang together—they were far more thrilling than anything he had studied at school! He marveled at how, within a few days, Beijing cleaned away its gigantic garbage dump, a notorious problem in the old capital. The revolution, he believed, also swept away in one great stroke the degenerate old way of life that trapped his parents and kept China backward. His trust in the cause was total: how joyful, how proud it was to be a part of something so wonderfully transformative!

  He was assigned to work at a district branch of the Communist Youth League.
Here, as a young cadre, he learned political skills that would benefit him all his life. Two things he valued the most: first, being watchful and sensitive to different points of views and personalities; second, focusing on the positive and taking the long view. He was, in a way, grooming himself to become a balanced optimist.

  Always drawn to literature, Wang spent a full year working on a novel—a lyrical portrait about a group of radicalized teenagers, budding romance mixing with innocent passion for the revolution—that ended up stuck with editors and rounds of revision. Meanwhile, he wrote a novella that changed his life.

  “A Young Man Comes to the Organizational Department” (组织部新来的年轻人) caused an immediate uproar when it was published in 1956. The story, set in a district Party office, depicts an idealistic young cadre much like Wang himself clashing with a range of variously jaded, savvy, and corrupt senior Party officials. Parts of the story are tinted with a mildly melancholy mood and hints of a romantic affair. This portrayal of Party officials as questionable characters, of a reality with shades of gray, was unusual at a time when literature served merely as the Party’s propaganda trumpet. Established Party apparatchiks at major newspapers accused Wang of harboring unhealthy skepticism and bourgeois sentiments. Given the temper of the time, Wang’s budding career could easily have been destroyed.

  But something extraordinary happened: Chairman Mao learned of the controversy and intervened. At a Central Party Committee meeting on propaganda work, Mao praised Wang’s novella as a work “against bureaucracy.” Mao had always worried about the erosion of revolutionary fervor by “bureaucratization.” He invented the notion of “permanent revolution” to fight both this tendency toward ossification as well as any rivals to his power. A master manipulator of populism, Mao liked to support the little guy against the big guy in political battles, especially when the latter is perceived as challenging his own authority. According to some later analysts, by backing Wang, Mao wanted to send a message to Peng Zhen, the powerful and popular mayor of Beijing, whom he suspected of being behind the apparatchiks’ attack on Wang. “I don’t know Wang Meng,” Mao said about the obscure twenty-two-year-old. “He’s not my son-in-law, but his critics don’t convince me. . . . Bureaucracy doesn’t exist in Bejing? I support anti-bureaucracy. Wang Meng has literary talent.”

  Half a century later, Wang described the experience of listening to the tape recording of Mao’s remarks in a high official’s office. “Sitting there, I felt bathed in spring wind and spring rain. Meanwhile, I warned myself: don’t get carried away, watch your performance, be even more modest and cautious after this good fortune has fallen on you from the sky.” Mao’s words bestowed not only the highest political protection but also instant fame: attacks on Wang evaporated.

  Unfortunately, the wind shifted soon. A few months later, when invited to air their opinions, intellectuals grew more critical about the Party rule. Mao switched quickly to attack mode and launched the “Anti-Rightist Campaign.” In the ensuing frenzy, a half million people were denounced and sent to labor camps, Wang among them. He was, after all, too small a chip on the great power chessboard to be worthy of the Chairman’s continued attention. Stripped of his Party membership, Wang was ordered to a mountainous farm outside Beijing along with a group of fellow “rightists.” There, for the next four years, they did menial labor during the day and “selfcriticism meetings” in the evenings.

  Later Chinese writing about the Maoist purges has tended to depict innocent victims suffering under cruel leadership. But Wang would describe in mordant, sometimes hilarious, detail how nearly all intellectuals, himself included, enthusiastically participated in the campaigns, attacking not only others but themselves.

  Most of the “Rightists” were, like Wang, true believers and Party loyalists, and their ordeal drove many to depression, divorce, and suicide. Wang himself underwent a period of crushing self-doubt. He convinced himself that he deserved this retribution for the privileges he had enjoyed, and tried as hard as he could to redeem himself through hard labor. Carrying rocks and planting trees, he wrote later, improved his health, which had been delicate since childhood.

  And he was fortunate to have married on the eve of the storm. Cui Ruifang, a gentle, kind young woman Wang had met through Youth League work and courted with passionate love letters, proved to be a lifelong bedrock of emotional support and a kindred spirit. A year older than Wang, she had great faith in him and his literary talents. He would not have survived without her, Wang wrote later. “I was lucky in two things in my life: love and literary success.”

  In 1962, in the wake of the Great Leap Forward and the devastating famine that killed over 30 million people, the campaign craze slackened and Wang was allowed to move back to the city. It was a relatively peaceful time. Wang and Cui both got teaching jobs, and, for the first time, they and their two young sons (occasional visits home were permitted during the years of exile), were able to live together. The apartment they were allocated was just one room, but it was full of sun.

  Wang, however, was restless. Finding the life of a college teacher staid and confining, he longed for a writing career and literary glory. So far he had published very little, and his fiction was criticized as “too intellectual.” But he knew nothing about workers and peasants, deemed to be the only worthy subject for “new literature.” A sharp decipherer of ideological winds, he also saw disturbing signs in Party directives. Mao had broken with the Soviet Union and constantly suspected Khrushchev-like traitors within his own Party. The political climate was again becoming fraught.

  That fall, Wang applied for a transfer to the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, a far west region populated mostly by Chinese Muslims. The idea was as bold as it was smart because it killed several birds with one stone: the move would answer the Party’s call for writers to “delve deep into the grassroots”; would broaden his urban, intellectual canvas; and would fling him far from the political quake center in case of trouble in the future.

  Cui supported the idea, and the transfer was quickly approved. In the winter of 1963, the entire Wang family packed their few belongings and boarded the westbound train. At that time, Urumqi, the Region’s capital, was a very long way from Beijing—it would take them five days and four nights to reach it. But, excited by their exotic adventure, the Wangs were in such a merry mood they even brought their goldfish in a glass jar.

  “How long do you think we’ll be there?” Cui asked as the train pulled out of Beijing.

  “A few years,” Wang replied confidently. “At the most, five years.”

  Within a week of their arrival, all the goldfish died—Xinjiang’s water turned out to be too cold and hard. The Wangs would spend the next sixteen years on the western frontier.

  Xinjiang suited Wang. Thanks to some sympathetic officials, he enjoyed friendly treatment at first. Arrangements were made for him to travel extensively to collect materials for writing. He marveled at the region’s spectacular beauty: magnificent snowcapped mountains, rocky desert, towering poplars, and lakes as incandescently blue as the sky. He was charmed by the Uighurs’ approach to life—by the way peasant families grew roses even when they didn’t have enough to eat; they would sometimes eat roses sweetened with sugar. He fell in love with the nang (馕, Muslim-style flatbread) and lamb that dominated the local cuisine, was moved by the passionate, melancholy Uighur songs, and enchanted by the “symphonic music” of their language.

  But he soon discovered that he was still a subject of fengsha (封杀), the word for an official ban on a person and his work, which literally means “seal off to kill.” After getting a travel piece into a local magazine, he found that nobody would print more of his writing, nor was he allowed to attend political meetings, a sign that he was in disgrace. On the other hand, he was not treated as an ordinary exile or an outright “enemy of the people.” He still received a cadre’s salary, even after he was relocated further west to Yining, a town on the western border. There, he spent six years
in a Uighur village, living with a Uighur family, sharing their food and bed. He did farm work and learned to ride horses. Idle in his state of political limbo, he channeled all his intellectual energy into learning Uighur, practicing by reciting the Little Red Book in the language. The effort was rare for a Han and won him great affection among the villagers. A daughter was born; Cui and Wang named her Joy of Yining, after the Uighur town where they lived.

  In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. In Beijing and other big cities, intellectuals and bureaucrats were brutalized. The Red Guards ransacked homes, burned books, and beat up teachers, sometimes torturing and killing them. Unable to bear the humiliation, some, like the celebrated novelist Lao She, committed suicide.

  In Yining, a terrified Wang burned all his personal correspondence. But geography mattered. The campaign was defanged and descended into a slapdash farce by the time it reached the remote border town, and Wang was protected by his Uighur friends: they hid him in the village during a violent period. The elderly Uighur peasant who sheltered him consoled him: “Don’t worry, Old Wang, three kinds of men are always needed in any country: the king, the courtier, and the poet. Sooner or later you will return to your post as a poet.”

  Wang knew he could do nothing except lie low and bide his time. He learned to smoke, swim, and drink hard liquor, and entertained himself by playing cards with neighbors and friends. Years went by in aimless gloom. On his fortieth birthday, in 1974, Wang announced to his wife that he could wait no more: he would resume writing on that very day. He spent the next year on The Scenery on This Side, a novel about Xinjiang rural life, trying laboriously to toe the Party line. It was pure torment. Eventually he had to abandon the hopeless project.