Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China

by Jianying Zha

  It’s an argument with consequences. There’s a sense in which China’s future will be determined by which of the contending interpretations of Mao’s legacy prevails. Wang’s old friend and former CWA colleague, the poet Shao Yanxiang, has denounced Mao’s policies as “anti-humanity.” Shao, who now describes institutions like CWA as a paichusuo (派出所, district police station), is among a host of retired reformist intellectuals who lost their faith in the CCP after Tiananmen. In his memoir, Farewell, Mao Zedong, he candidly details his early Communist indoctrination and later disillusionment. Books like this or Mao: The Untold Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday are usually published in Hong Kong and banned in the Mainland. But they often get uploaded or excerpted on the Internet (for those who know how to “climb over the Great Firewall” to read) or smuggled in privately, and thus enjoy a limited stealth circulation in the Mainland.

  But Wang was not impressed by Chang and Halliday’s book. Nor does he agree with Shao’s judgment. “Blaming China’s problems on Mao is too simplistic,” Wang told me. “As a politician, Mao’s good deeds and bad deeds were both determined by China’s history and culture. He was a political and literary genius. You know his poetry and calligraphy. And I think he did two great things. The first was leaving Hong Kong alone in 1949, even though at that time he could have taken it over with a brigade. The second was breaking with the Soviet Union. So he left a window open to the West and got China out of the big socialist family. But you want to talk about Mao’s cruelties? Well, if you recall all the tortures that happened at the Chinese courts, all those slow-cutting executions in the past dynasties, he certainly had plenty of predecessors! But this is not yet the time for a real discussion about Mao.”

  Other critics have their explanations for Wang’s ambivalence toward Mao. “Mao had once helped Wang,” Zhu Xueqin says. “It’s very human that Wang feels grateful; I fully understand that. Still, after looking at Mao’s good side and the bad side, one ultimately should reject Mao. Wang can’t take that final step. Why? He’s too clever, too calculating.”

  Others think the explanation is generational. “This is a common phenomenon among Wang’s generation of educated Chinese,” Xie Youshun, a noted young literary critic from Fujian, told me. “They tend to be hard on their own biological fathers, but absolutely devoted to their spiritual father figures. Wang is not talking out of political expediency, since denouncing Mao is quite fashionable among intellectuals these days. This is true loyalty.”

  Xu Zidong, a professor of modern Chinese literature at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, thinks Wang’s generation has been brainwashed. “It’s difficult for our generation to understand their loyalty and faith in the Communist Party,” he said to me. Xu has written a penetrating paper on Wang’s second novel, Huodong Bian Renxing (活动变人形), and concludes that the novel is partly devised to justify the necessity of the Chinese revolution.

  Once, when Wang was being interviewed on television, the host asked him whether he had been “brainwashed” by Communist ideology. Wang chortled: “Brainwashing? Do you think anyone can take out my brain and give it a wash?” He went on explaining how he chose to embrace revolution and Communism. It was a choice of free will; there was no coercion. Then he cited a line from a famous poem by the poet Bei Dao: I do not believe! “Well,” Wang said, his face solemn on the screen, his voice rising slightly. “I can say this about my generation: We believe! ”

  Bei Dao is the Allen Ginsburg of my generation of Chinese who, born in the decade straddling the 1950s and 1960s, grew up in the Cultural Revolution. The themes of his early poetry—alienation, skepticism, personal salvation through romantic love—struck all the keynotes of our journey from being Mao’s little red children to bitterly disillusioned adults. We are the generation that embraced the values of liberal democracy when China opened up to the West in the 1980s, and lost our hope again when the government rolled out the tanks in 1989. We have, out of all these experiences, a profound distrust of the Communist Party. Some of us consider the entire communist revolution a tragic mistake in modern Chinese history. And yet, as we journey on from our radical, disillusioned youthful years to the more matured age of our lives, and as China’s reforms and development enter a more complicated phase, our perspectives on the Chinese Revolution, and on our parents, are also going through revisions. In the 1980s, I had many heated arguments with my father about his faith. The son of a wealthy landlord turned Communist guerrilla fighter and later persecuted academic intellectual, his life story was not very different from Wang’s. Yet watching Wang defending his generation’s dignity and their choice to believe, I was both fascinated and touched. In Wang’s avowal, I recognized my father, who, until his death, was willing to revise but not renounce his faith. I was also touched because Wang is one of the few Chinese writers who has taken personal responsibility for his youthful zealotry. There was unsparing honesty and courage in such writing. Yet why does he feel so compelled to reaffirm a faith that has brought so much destruction and delusion?

  One afternoon in late 2009, I had tea with Wang in Beijing’s Sanlian Café, where he had just autographed copies of his new book on Lao Zi. Dressed in dark slacks and a black jacket with a mandarin collar, Wang looked both alert and relaxed. In the course of our chat, I asked about the persistent criticism that he is an apologist for the Chinese government. “Churchill once said, ‘I support democracy not because it is so good, but because it would be worse without it,’ ” Wang replied, smiling. “My view on the Chinese Communist Party is the same: I support it not because it’s that good, but because it would be worse without it. I once told a foreign friend: You are a very capable man, but if you have to govern China, it won’t last more than three days before the country falls into chaos and you lose your own head. And if I had to take the job? Since I dipped my foot in Chinese politics a little and I have some understanding of it, I might last two weeks. After that, China would fall into chaos, and I’d lose my head too. So, I’m not talking about the legitimacy of the Chinese revolution. I’m talking about its inevitability. Let me tell you about my recent visit to Beichuan”—the center of the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake. “I stood there looking at the sight of the ruins—it’s absolutely terrifying, just awe-striking! Experts tell me: a great earthquake like that is caused by an interlinked assortment of underground movements that have been happening for a thousand years. That’s why when it finally erupts, it must shake heaven and earth.” He took a sip of tea and looked at me closely. “You see what I mean? It’s the same with the Chinese Revolution.”

  This image he conjured up, of a great, inevitable eruption with terrifying consequences, suddenly reminded me of an earlier conversation at Wang’s home. I had pestered Wang then with a similar question: “If the Communists hadn’t won, isn’t it possible that we Chinese would have suffered less in a different path toward modernization?”

  Wang had answered: “Egalitarian leftist trends had been pent up for several thousand years in China until the Opium War gave it a shove. It erupted with the 1911 Revolution, which toppled the imperial system, but it had not reached a climax. It had to go on, driving toward a climax. China has a long tradition of violent dynastic changes. And what are the two things that excite young people the most? Sex and revolution!”

  But, I pointed out, despite the revolution’s immense human cost, plenty of the social and moral ills—corruption and inequality—of old China persist.

  “Yes, they still do, don’t they?” he said, frowning. And then he sighed. “Jianying, what happened, happened a long time ago. I’m not interested in these ‘what if’ questions.” With a look of weariness, he ended my probing and turned to other topics.

  These conversations reminded me of a story Wang published in the 1980s, “Hard Times to Meet” (相见时难). The protagonist, Wong, seemingly an authorial alter ego, meets with an old friend, a Chinese woman who lives in the United States. Preoccupied by the horrors of the Chinese Revolution, she insists on havi
ng a “deeper discussion” with Wong. Wong mentally rehearses his response: “Those who are terrified by the horrors, please go away. History will not stop its forward march for fear of paying a price.... You may feel depressed. You have the right to feel depressed. But I have no right to feel depressed, because I am a master of present China.” And yet Wong is made so uneasy by the prospect of this conversation that he goes on a trip to avoid her.

  “I am a master of present China”: that’s not something Wang ever said to me. But there was no avoiding the pride, and responsibility, he felt in belonging to the elite of this new China. And then there is the panorama, the long view. Que será, será. The Communist revolution and its victory, the great famine, the Cultural Revolution, the cult of Mao, and the Red Guard’s mania . . . the revolution’s roaring, soaring fire has swallowed up tens of millions of lives, including its own loyal children, in the course of reaching its climax. But all of these are as interconnected and inevitable as the terrifying, aweinspiring eruptions of Mother Earth. Tragic, yes, but also somehow magnificent. In this ancient land haunted by an aggregation of ghostly forces and suppressed underground murmurs, it was all part of the great cost we Chinese must pay for our nation’s progress to modernity.

  Wang was, in a way, putting to good use the two invaluable skills he had acquired in his Youth League days: he was taking the big picture, the long view; and he was balancing his perspectives. That’s why, surveying it all from a higher plain, Wang could describe the mistakes of the revolution as “a few staggering footprints in a specific time frame.”

  What’s more important, the revolutionary climax is over, the destructive passions are dissipated, and the Party has turned to a constructive path. So why not be positive and look ahead? As the protagonist in one of his famous short stories, “Salute from a Bolshevik” (布礼), put it sentimentally: “The dear mother may beat her child, but the child will never resent his mother, for the mother’s anger will fade and she will hold her child and cry over it.”

  This is probably how Wang salvaged and kept his faith on a delicate yet firm balance. If he can no longer be an innocent true believer in communism, he can now be a wise true believer in the inevitable progress of history. It also means he can remain an incorrigible optimist. “You can be a real optimist only after you have tasted real bitterness and suffered real pain,” Wang likes to say. “For joy will come after you have drained all your tears [泪尽则喜].”

  Wang’s attitude toward writing is also bathed in a wide-ranging optimism. “A writer should not be a judge of the world,” he said in an interview. “He should be an interested, passionate lover of the world. Some writers like to curse the world. I try my best to avoid this type of people, for they affect my appetite and health. The world is rich. Creators of literature should not be narrow-sighted.”

  Wang often invokes the image of the sea, his favorite symbol for both the world and the best of writing. Here is a phenomenon that inspires awe and worship: its grandeur, its murky force, its violent poetry and great calm, its perpetual energy and all-encompassing capacity, its eternal mystery. In the past thirty years Wang has been spending nearly every summer at Beidaihe, in a seaside hotel owned by the CWA, writing in the morning, swimming in the afternoon. He takes great pride in swimming in the ocean—a feat his father yearned to accomplish but never did, a hobby that has taken on an existential meaning for the son. “Dream of the Sea” (海之梦), one of his most lyrical stories, is set by the sea.

  But such a broad view of literature as a loving panoramic mirror of the universe can also be a weakness. Wang has proved himself to be a literary decathlete, a prolific all-around man of letters, but he may also have dissipated his energy by going to so many places and covering so much. Being good at so many things can make good art, but can it make great art?

  A friend from Hebei once said to me, “Wang Meng is like a typical Hebei cook. He likes to put everything into the pot—garlic, potato, meat—and mix them all up. But it doesn’t mean what comes out is great cuisine.”

  Xie Youshun told me that he finds Wang’s writing very broad but not very deep. “He has covered too wide a range, tried a lot of techniques, but hasn’t dug deeply into the human nature. His work is more concerned with human standing in social relations, less with the individual self. He is not interested in interrogating his own soul. He learned from Western modernist fiction at a superficial level, but avoided the painful and ignominious aspects of the self-probing. So in the end his work lacks that intense power of the great literature which touches the depth of your soul.” In other words, Wang is not a Dostoevsky or a Tolstoy, nor is he a writer like Joyce or Woolf, who would take a style (like stream of consciousness) to an extreme and exhaust its possibilities as an art form.

  But Sun Ganlu, a leading figure in China’s modernist fiction scene, ranks Wang as one of the very best writers in contemporary China. “Some writers are stylists, like sculptors who can carve with precision and refinement. They are very good at small, short works. But they are not majestic. Wang writes like a great river gushing a thousand miles with gusto.” Sun said in the 1980s he wasn’t impressed by Wang’s writing, but now he appreciated it much more. He finds Wang’s language appealing because it has a special texture and warmth. “It has a young Bolshevik’s passion, certain petit bourgeois sentiments, tinges of modernism, and the deep feelings of a man seasoned through so many historical changes. It’s a rich body of work where you can find all the important themes of modern China: enlightenment, revolution, reform, tradition, modernity, democracy. His writing is a step-by-step reflection of our times.”

  If Wang wins the Nobel Prize in Literature one day, Sun said, it would be a fine choice. “Not everything he’s written is great, but he has the weight.”

  Wang keeps on producing at a furious speed. Since finishing the Seasons Series, he has put out another novel, dozens of short stories, a book about his “philosophy of life,” a three-volume memoir, and about ten books of criticism, lectures, interviews, and essays. Roughly a book and a half per year.

  And he travels a great deal, spending one third of every year on visits abroad and domestic. He gives public lectures. He attends literary events. In the past few years, he has also become a frequent talk-show guest on Chinese television. Sometimes I happened to be a guest on one of these talk shows. Every time he showed up at the studio we would end up taping four or five episodes at one shot. With cameras rolling and lights flooding, we would discuss different topics for two to three hours, with hardly a break. Once, to set a date for our next studio taping, Wang text-messaged me his schedule. I couldn’t believe my eyes: that month Wang was going on six trips, including Australia and Macao!

  Many people are amazed by Wang’s energy and productivity; some are slightly puzzled. “He is a polymath, but why is he writing so much?” a literary critic wondered to me. When I told him about the “Hebei cook,” he shook his head. “The question isn’t why he likes to mix so many things in the pot. The question is: why is he always in the kitchen? It makes you wonder whether he is trying to run away from something.”

  Wang jokes about his “writing too much” as an overcompensation syndrome from the two decades of fengsha, but he is clearly proud of his productivity and his ability to cover the distances. In the Confucian literati tradition, travel is as important as reading in one’s quest for true knowledge. It is how one gets to know the real world and real people. But even with the best of intentions and most earnest striving, can someone like Wang, constantly surrounded by VIP privileges and media lights, still retain any authentic access to his surroundings?

  In the summer of 2009, I joined Wang and a group of writers on a trip across Xinjiang. The nine-day program was sponsored by the China Writers Association and hosted by its local branches in Xinjiang; it was partly to commemorate Wang’s writing about Xinjiang and partly for caifeng: giving the writers an opportunity to gather fresh material from the grassroots. Wang has written a lot about Xinjiang. The essays are
infused with a deep gratefulness and affection for the region where exile had turned into a blessing. His stories about Uighur life, a series of Chekhov-like tales written in simple language and realist style, are among the best and most moving of his fiction works. Without any narrative indulgence, these works show a real attentiveness to details of ordinary life; the moody beauty of nature, gentle comedy; and black humor amidst disaster. Reading them, you could feel Wang’s genuine respect for a culture and a people. Given his cosseted existence, I wondered what remained of such connections.

  This was my first CWA event and an eye-opener. From arrival to departure, we were looked after. We stayed at four-star hotels, enjoyed sumptuous meals with endless rounds of liquor, listened to speeches by local officials, watched folk performances, attended regional literary festivals. All was prearranged, and local officials and guides accompanied us everywhere: the daily banquets, the sightseeing tours, the shopping trips. There was no free time to roam the streets or meet people on our own. Toward the end of the program, in Kashgar, a couple of writers and I decided to skip another banquet and venture out on our own to a Uighur neighborhood. Two hours later, an anxious local guide found us and gave us a stern warning not to do it again. “You could be lost,” she said, “and get stabbed in a back alley!” But whenever I asked questions about Han-Uighur conflicts, our hosts looked away and changed the subject.

  We got more protection than ordinary tourists. When our group traveled from one town to another, police cars came to lead the way for our fleet of vans. I asked one of the local hosts whether this was due to ethnic tension in Xinjiang. No, he answered, it was due to the presence of two minister-ranked officials traveling among us: Tie Ning, the CWA chairwoman, and Wang Meng. This is standard treatment of high officials, he said. When traveling by air, Wang and Tie always fly business class and board the plane from the VIP lane.