Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China

by Jianying Zha

  When we reached Bayandai, the Uighur village where Wang used to live in the 1970s, a mob of paparazzi descended on him and followed him every step of the way. An elderly man came up and buried his face in Wang’s shoulders and started sobbing. He was a former village head who knew Wang from thirty years earlier, and the two men embraced for a long time. Soon Wang was chatting in Uighur with elderly villagers he knew from the old days. On the whole, though, the scene was nearly surreal, with the forest of TV cameras and their glaring lights and a large crowd of onlookers. Another feast waited for us, but Wang barely warmed his seat before he was asked to write some calligraphy for the village. He left the table. The entire entourage took off shortly afterward, leaving the villagers gaping at the cars and vans departing in a storm of dust.

  One day, a member of our group happened to overhear Wang laughing and talking in Uighur with the chairman of the Xinjiang regional government, and remarked that Wang sounded like “a different Wang Meng.” The Uigur official replied, “Oh, that’s the real Wang Meng, the one from Bayandai!” Later, Wang related this exchange to a largely Uighur audience who packed a conference hall to hear him. He talked about how, at certain times in China, you just can’t be your real self even if you want to. As he spoke, he grew emotional and started chopping the air with his hand. “That’s right: that Uighur-speaking Wang Meng is the real Wang Meng! And the real Wang Meng will always belong to Bayandai, to Xinjiang!” He was almost shouting. The applause of the Uighur audiences was long and hard.

  It’s obvious that the Uighurs loved and eagerly adopted Wang. Despite the fame and status he had acquired, there was genuineness and spontaneity in the way Uighurs interacted with him: they grabbed him, hugged him, cried, laughed, and involved him in rapid Uighur dialogues. And Wang never hid his delight in such moments. One day, in a plaza near Kashgar, a Uighur lad danced up to Wang during a kitschy “folk” ceremony, followed by a whole troupe of singers and dancers dressed in colorful costumes. Wang instinctively burst into a dance himself, swinging his arms and body and tapping his feet in perfect rhythm, Uighur-style. The lad beamed as though he’d just won the lottery. The crowd cheered wildly. A staged routine had been transformed into an occasion of real merriment.

  But such moments were rare among the daily procession of vacuous speeches and pomp. I often wondered how Wang really felt about the extravagance and artificiality of our caifeng tour.

  On July 5, just hours after we departed from Xinjiang, reality intruded. Bloody riots broke out in the region’s capital, triggered by a brawl in southern China in which two Uighurs were slain. By the end of the riots, nearly two hundred people were dead and almost two thousand injured, most of them Han. As ethnic tension escalated, the government placed the region under heavy military patrol and shut down the Internet. Wang kept mute on the subject.

  In October, all Chinese media celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Wang was a guest in several talk-show segments that month. During one, he described his deep personal bond with the Uighurs, telling a few well-worn stories from his Xinjiang years—like the one about the time he and a Uighur friend sat by the highway and drank a whole bottle of liquor from a shared bicycle bell cup. He sounded warm, self-deprecating, a little nostalgic. The message was unmistaken: ethnic harmony and Han-Uighur friendship is totally possible. But he said nothing about the present. The state media wouldn’t allow any critical discussion of the government’s ethnic policies, anyway. So the riots went unmentioned.

  Wang’s pragmatism brought to mind what he had said to me once when his spirits were low. “China is pitiful—any leader who talks about democracy loses his power,” he told me. “With per-capita GDP still so low, the country is a paper tiger. The slightest stir of wind and grass makes the government nervous.” Then, he had said wistfully, “If only China gets to develop in peace for another twenty years, then the situation will be different. But now?” He sighed. “Well, at least it seems we won’t go back to the Maoist age.”

  If the great accommodator allowed himself dreams of social transformation, I had noticed that devotees of social transformation had been growing less averse to accommodation. The year before our tea at the Sanlian Café, I’d been at a welcome-back dinner that Liu Xiaobo hosted for my brother, Jianguo, who had just served a nine-year term in prison for his pro-democracy activism. For a few months, policemen, two on a shift, followed Jianguo wherever he went. Jianguo, undeterred, talked headily about plans for mobilizing China’s dissidents. Liu tamped down Jianguo’s enthusiasm, and later asked me to caution my brother about his exaggerated expectations. He used a classical formula: “Buyao yilan zhongshan xiao!” (不要一览众山小!, “Don’t stand on top of a mountain and think that everything is beneath you!”) Recalling Wang’s earlier portrait of the cocky black horse, I couldn’t help smiling.

  Liu, once a firebrand who equated moderation with capitulation and politeness with servility, had matured. Even as he solicited signatures for Charter 08, he was gracious toward those who declined to sign. A Shanghai professor told me that after he decided not to sign—he didn’t want to jeopardize a scholarship fund for young Chinese scholars that he was setting up—Liu made a point of telling him that he fully understood and respected his decision, that it was important to be able to continue to do one’s best work in one’s own field. In the years just before the Chinese state decided it could not tolerate him living as a free man, Liu sought a relationship with the state that was no longer simply combative. The world wouldn’t have it so.

  Supine acquiescence or intransigent opposition—are those really the choices? Wang’s relationship with the Chinese state is ultimately at the center of his work and life. It is also at the center of the controversies about him. Unlike many Chinese liberal intellectuals, who now stress their independent spirit and distance from the state, Wang never tries to separate himself from it. Describing his return from Xinjiang to Beijing, Wang admitted that he “felt moved as soon as I entered the Great Hall of the People,” the location for China’s highest state functions. And he continued: “The People’s Republic of China has never been an object outside of me. When the water you drink, the food you eat, everything comes from the ‘state,’ even your shit needs to be handled by the government’s hygiene department, how can you really boast about your distance?”

  With his warmth and wit, his optimism, his professed faith in (and gentle criticisms of) the Party, Wang humanizes the state. That’s why people who rebel against the state and want to break with the system dislike him, and why others like him. Indeed, his own character and long career—the resilience and adaptive skills, the energy and ceaseless activities, the high productivity—are almost a parable of the Chinese state. How can you beat a phenomenon that makes an amazing comeback from a great catastrophe and keeps on going, expanding and reinventing itself?

  Jin Zhong, editor of Open magazine, a Hong Kong monthly that is vociferously critical of the Chinese Communist Party, sees Wang as influential but dangerous. Wang reminds him of Zhou Enlai, Mao’s loyal, obedient premier. “Zhou was a beloved, popular figure among Chinese people because he had a humane and charming personality. But he never challenged Mao, and ultimately he was in the service of great evil.” In Jin’s opinion, men like Wang are the foundation of China’s authoritarian system and would only make it last longer.

  Another harsh remark was made by Zhang Er, a Chinese poet who now resides in the United States. “China is still a culture of master and servants: one person rules from the top and all others are subservient. Wang is just an outstanding servant.”

  The Chinese word for “servant” is usually puren (仆人), as in “public servant” (gongpu, 公仆). But the word she used, nucai (奴才), can be translated as “servant” or “slave material.” She chose the pejorative term carefully, because she regards Wang as a familiar specimen—a contemporary example of a long Chinese tradition in which the best and brightest of the country willingly and loyally
served the imperial court.

  Other liberals take a gentler view. One tells me, “Wang understands China deeply. He knows it could only change gradually, little by little. To rush the process is dangerous. If you look at his whole career as a writer and an official, he comes out as a mainstream moderate. What he embodies is Zhongyong Zhidao [中庸之道], the middle way.” He was using a Confucian term, alluding to a tradition in which a true gentleman is one who avoids extremes, takes a careful, reasonable measure of all things under heaven, and arrives at an ideal balance.

  There is even a sense in which Wang and Liu Xiaobo, seeming opposites, have been participants in a common cause. Liu, after his radical anti-Communist youth, matured into a seasoned, moderate champion of nonviolent political reform: he continued to be critical of the government, but gave it credit for economic reforms and for those instances where it displayed greater tolerance. “I have no enemy and no hatred,” Liu stated at his trial. In an article published last February, he wrote that political reform “should be gradual, peaceful, orderly and controllable,” that “orderly and controllable social change is better than one which is chaotic and out of control,” and that “the order of a bad government is better than the chaos of anarchy.” Wang—often from within the palace gates—has been a nimble and persistent advocate of liberalization and tolerance, having battled against the hard-liners throughout his official and literary career. The fact that the two men have, in different ways, both moved toward the center surely says a great deal about where China is today.

  Zhongyong zhidao: Wang’s sensibilities and talents are, in fact, continuous with the Confucian tradition. If, broadly speaking, Western culture emphasizes liberty, innovation, and the individual, then the Confucian culture emphasizes benevolent rule, refinement, and social harmony. There’s some irony in the way that Confucianism—for all the radical attempts of the past century to sweep China’s “feudal tradition” into the dustbin of history—has returned with vengeance. The trend is visible in popular TV lectures on The Analects, in bestselling books about Confucianism and Taoism; in the vogue of reading classics among schoolchildren and adults. It’s in the new government slogan of “building a harmonious society,” in Premier Wen Jiabao’s penchant for peppering his speeches with classical quotations, in the state-funded establishment of Confucius Institutes abroad. So much of the contemporary culture of the state—the bureaucracy, the power hierarchy, the theatricality and sonorous rhetoric—represent a return to an old imperial tradition. As an anthropologist friend observed to me: “You can almost see the present Chinese bureaucracy and the Communist Party as an extension of the Qing dynasty!” And Wang, like many of the protagonists in his fiction, really does evoke the image of the good official from the Confucian literati tradition: someone loyal to the emperor and the state, compassionate toward the people, diligent in his duties, devoted not to changing the system but making it work better.

  Western individualism and democracy, on the other hand, will be a contradiction—a problem for Wang, ultimately. Writing about his many visits to America, Wang noted the intense self-regard and the loneliness of American life, the solitary individual who lives in a big house or on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. The Chinese, he observed, are not fit for such a way of life. He admits that he finds solitude unbearable and gets homesick easily. “China has all kinds of problems,” he once said to me, “but it doesn’t have loneliness and boredom, because Chinese life is always renao!” Renao (热闹) means, literally, hot and noisy.

  Yet loyalty to Chinese culture has not prevented Wang from promoting cosmopolitanism. In an interview after winning the gold medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics, the hurdler Liu Xiang exclaimed: “This proves the yellow race can also be number one!” Wang pointed out that such words were petty, in bad form, even racist. His criticism set off a barrage of flaming retorts from Liu Xiang’s fans. In China, Liu Xiang is a huge icon just like Yao Ming. But Wang is not afraid of criticizing their prickly nationalistic pride.

  Wang apparently has an insatiable appetite for foreign travels, and his travel writing is full of an almost childlike delight in the multiplicity of the world: beautiful Africans, Italian pastas, evening bell in Cambridge, and rodeo in Texas—all are noted with admiration and intelligence. He has been tirelessly exhorting the Chinese to be more broad-minded, more openhearted, to learn from others, including Western democracies. To him, the ability to enjoy and learn from others is critical in keeping your own culture vital and rich.

  Of course, for Wang, every ship must have an anchor, and all journeys must lead home. Confucius himself was an indefatigable traveler and a humble learner, and every Chinese is familiar with the famous lines from The Analects: “Among every three persons I meet on the way, one must be a teacher for me” (三人行必有我师). Yet in the end, what Confucius cared more than anything else in his life was using one’s knowledge to serve the country, to provide useful ideas for the state, whether through an official career, or by teaching and writing. It is in this sense that Wang is a descendant of a long and enduring Chinese tradition, and like all who devote their lives to serving a great center of power and culture, his legacy—his achievements and compromises—will be assessed accordingly.

  Postscript

  On October 8, 2010, Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while serving his eleven-year sentence in a prison in Liaoning Province. Chinese foreign ministry called the decision of the Nobel Prize Committee a “blasphemy,” and the state media blocked all coverage of the news. Many Chinese citizens nonetheless learned about the prize via the Internet and celebrated.

  Two weeks earlier, in September, Wang gave a talk at Harvard’s Asia Center. Before he arrived, he lamented to me how little dialogue there had been, in the post-1989 era, between Chinese and American writers—less, he said, than between Chinese and American military officials. He carefully prepared his talk in English, in the hopes of speaking across a chasm. Toward the end of his remarks, departing from prepared script, he recalled his childhood deprivations, the humiliating memory of the Japanese occupation, and his youthful involvement in the Chinese revolution. He retold a conversation he had when his grandson turned fourteen, the age Wang joined the Communist Party. When he criticized the boy for spending too much time on computer games, the boy replied, “Poor Grandpa, I understand you. I’m sure you had no toys when you were a kid. If you had a childhood without toys, what else could you do except join the revolution?” As the audience laughed appreciatively, Wang continued, “I think perhaps he is right. Times are different; the world has changed. So has China. I can’t imagine that my grandson’s generation will copy my path in life. But I firmly believe that all governments in the world have an obligation to provide sufficient toys and good books for the children and young people; otherwise, the young people have the right to join a revolution, to overthrow that useless government.” The audience applauded loudly. But Wang was not finished.

  “I have mentioned the past repeatedly,” he said, “which reminds me of Barbra Streisand’s song in the ‘The Way We Were.’ ” He repeated some of the famous lyrics: “If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we? Could we?” And then he continued, soberly: “I’d like to tell you, if I had the chance to do it all again, I would and I could as I did. Meanwhile, I still hope I can be your faithful and trustworthy friend, forever.”

  EPILOGUE

  Predicting China’s future is an impossible yet sometimes tempting task. So far, experts’ records have not proven to be much better than that of fortune tellers. The efforts remind me of what a friend told me about the 2010 Microsoft convention in Seattle. The two designated major themes at the convention, he informed me, were “Cloud Computing” and “China.” Well, perhaps trying to figure out a country like China is much like computing in the clouds! But I, too, have occasionally succumbed to this temptation. In the opening section of China Pop, my 1995 book on China’s cultural transition after Tiananmen, I wrote:After a century of tumultuou
s wars and revolution at great human cost, China appears to have finally turned to the path of 和平演变 (heping yanbian), “peaceful evolution.” In her long struggle for modernity, this is a profoundly important shift. For the more optimistic champions of gradualist reform, Tiananmen may represent the tragic last gasp of the radical, revolutionary approach to changing China. The current path requires its own human toll and a good deal of compromise and deferment. Yet many believe that, in the long run, this way of change will bring more substantial gains at a lower cost of human sacrifice.

  At present, the slow transformation from “communism, Chinese style” to “market economy, socialist style” remains fluid, shifting, its future uncertain. China will probably remain a 四不像 (sibuxiang) for a long time, a bizarre, hybrid animal neither horse nor donkey, neither here nor there.

  Fifteen years on—it seems to have gone by in a flash!—I can still stand by these statements, but the landscape has altered enough to warrant some additional remarks. As I write these words in fall 2010, China has just surpassed Japan to become the second-largest economy in the world, after overtaking Germany as the largest exporter and the United States as the biggest automobile market; hence its actions have an increasing impact in the international arena. In both political and academic circles around the world, people wonder and fret about the implications of China’s reemergence as a global power. Is it going to be a responsible, benign great power that might someday offer an alternative, attractive set of cultural values? Or is it going to be a selfish, menacing great power that will accelerate the depletion of natural resources and challenge world peace?

  With some reduction and exaggeration, I think analysts about China loosely fall into two schools.