by Linda Jaivin
For many younger faddists, however, there aren't any deeper meanings. Friends of mine hold parties where they sing arias from Cultural Revolution operas and songs and giggle at lines like ‘I love to read Chairman Mao's books most of all, a thousand times, ten thousand times I read them again and again.’ Then they go to McDonald's for a burger.
Some Chinese men, of course, think that Mao was the greatest simply because he's supposed to have bonked hundreds, if not thousands of women in his time. This is interesting, and not just because it disproves the theory that Beavis and Butthead are culturally specific archetypes.
As Mao grew older he developed a taste for young virgins. Chinese medicine, which concerns itself among other things with the balance of female yin and male yang principles, maintains in some of its more esoteric branches that deflowering virgins is good for bolstering a man's yang.
The problem, as I see it, is that Mao had too much yang for anyone's good: his own, China's virgin population, and indeed, the nation itself. Think about it. This is a man who, to demonstrate his physical vigour, swam the Yangtze River seven times.
That's such a male thing to do. I mean, a woman would swim the river once to prove she could do it, and then get on with more important things.
Of course, violent revolution, which involves a lot of he-men and some he-women waving around really big guns while quoting from Marx, the man with one of the most impressive beards in world history, is also a mucho macho thing.
Once the Communists came to power, they commemorated all this frenetic masculine activity with suitably phallic-shaped monuments like the one erected—(Beavis and Butthead: ‘She said erected? Heh heh heh’)—to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square. The thousands of statues of Mao himself featured one arm raised in a salute, the general outline of which Mae West would have appreciated. Mao was happy to see everybody. And there was a gun in his pocket too.
Then Deng Xiaoping came along. Small, round, flaccid, spouting pragmatic little sayings like ‘it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice, it's a good cat’, Deng guided China towards a gentler kind of socialism. He even promoted the intellectual—stereotyped in Mao's China as a skinny, bespectacled, comically effete creature—to a place in the official revolutionary vanguard alongside those ruddy, well-muscled, Real Men workers, peasants and soldiers. Women, meanwhile, were called down off those high-tension wires where they'd posed for so many impressive photographs during the Cultural Revolution and told to put on make-up and high heels: the Beijing Review needed some miniskirt pictures to illustrate the Reform and Open Door policies. Everyone was encouraged to stop using phrases like ‘class struggle’ and start talking about things like ‘cultural exchange’. You could almost feel the surge of oestrogen through China's body politic.
In fact, the ‘feminisation’ of China went only so far. Every few years, beginning in 1979 and most dramatically in 1989, Deng's fans lowered their starry gaze and discovered that the little man was capable of a hard line after all. Still, the general perception was that, overall, things were becoming more relaxed, softening up: ideology, social mores and people themselves. At first, this was warmly and widely welcomed. Then, round about the mid-1980s, people, especially male people, began to fret.
The word ‘impotence’ was on everyone's lips, even if they all pretended to be talking about someone else. Medicine shops began doing a roaring trade in dogs' penises and other traditional aphrodisiacs and impotency cures. Stories circulated like the one about a famous middle-aged writer whose uplifting attempts with special creams only succeeded in leaving his wife with a wild itch she unfortunately remained unable to scratch.
In 1985, the middle-aged male author Zhang Xianliang wrote a novel called Half of Man Is Woman that embodied the anxieties of an ‘emasculated’ age and became a controversial bestseller. The protagonist had become sexually impotent as the result of his experiences of political persecution. In other words, having been screwed over by Mao and the revolution, he couldn't get it up any more with women. He's sent to a labour camp where he finds a soul mate in a gelding grey. The horse is a horse, of course, of course, but, like Mr Ed, this one talks, and what he tells the protagonist embodies the anxieties of the man who feels no longer a man:
…like me, you suffer an impairment; though mine is physical and yours mental, the end result is the same: we are both doomed to lives of under-achievement. We are fated to be subject to the whims of others, to follow their lead, to be whipped into compliance and to be rode over roughshod… If only one out of ten Chinese males were a real man, this country wouldn't be in the mess it is.1
He wasn't the only one worried about the Real Man deficiency. In Shanghai, the male playwright Sha Yexin produced a work called In Search of a Real Man. In it, a woman of marriageable age dates a number of potential husbands. Representing a cross-section of contemporary Chinese manhood, from dweebs to yobbos, they leave her in despair of ever finding the Real Man of her dreams. Finally, she meets an educated and progressive factory manager, a model citizen of the Reform Era. She seems happy enough, but even the playwright doesn't seem entirely convinced by this resolution. In the end, the audience is left wondering; sure, economic reform is rational, yes, economic reform is good, but is it really sexy?
This question was examined from a slightly different angle in a fascinating public debate about soap-opera heroes. In late 1990, Chinese television screened a soapie called ‘Aspirations’ that followed the fate of several Beijing families from the Cultural Revolution to the present day. One of the central characters was a worker and party member called Song Dacheng. Song was honest, helpful, conscientious, community-minded and self-sacrificing to the extent of giving up the woman he loved without a struggle when she expressed interest in someone else. When the reforms got under way, he became a manager and guided his factory into profitability, remaining an emotional softie.
The following year, the American series ‘Dynasty’ screened on Chinese television and was, like ‘Aspirations’, tremendously popular. Dubbed into Chinese, ‘Haomen Enyuarn’, as it was called—literally ‘the karmic relations of the rich and powerful’—captivated the nation. If Song Dacheng was a model proletarian, Blake of ‘Dynasty’ was a stereotypical capitalist: self-protective, ruthless, tough—in other words, not unlike a stereotypical Communist. The Chinese masses loved him.
The Beijing Youth News, the organ of the capital's Communist Youth League, organised a talkfest on the subject ‘Good Guy or Strongman, New Meanings for an Old Subject: Whom Would You Choose—Song Dacheng or Blake?’ One woman, a student, commented that Song Dacheng-like characters were a dime a dozen in China. Song was honest, reliable and sincere, in her words, ‘the embodiment of nearly all the traditional Chinese virtues’. But ‘as a man,’ she insisted, ‘he was lacking something.’
Blake's ‘intrepid spirit and the impression he gives that he will never lose,’ she continued, ‘is more in keeping with today's lifestyle.’ One of her male classmates went even further, claiming that his aim in life was to be just like Blake, and to cultivate ‘an indomitable spirit that would be undeterred by any obstacles’.
A social scientist also thought that most Chinese would definitely prefer Blake to Song Dacheng. ‘Most Chinese men,’ she declared, ‘were neuters.’
You can't blame Chinese men for being worried about their manhood when Chinese women go around saying things like that. Chinese women, of course, exist in the most ideologically confused space of all. The Communists promised to liberate women from old-fashioned oppression and then established a new crypto-patriarchy. In the Cultural Revolution, women were suddenly empowered to do everything men did and more, even highly testosteronal things like strangling ‘class enemies’ to death while sporting baggy clothing and bad haircuts. ‘Feminine’ became a bad word, like ‘scum’ or ‘bourgeois’.
In a famous incident, when Mao met a Red Guard whose name meant ‘gentle and refined’, he suggested she change it to one that mean
t ‘must fight armed struggle’. She followed his advice, and lots of other women eagerly imitated her example. Mao's wife Jiang Qing, meanwhile, held more power than any woman had since the last Dowager Empress, and brandished it like a whip.
When the Cultural Revolution ended, and Madame Lash was arrested together with her cronies as the ‘Gang of Four’, the movement for women's equality, such as it was, suffered a backlash the strength of which would have left Susan Faludi groping for her teeth on the floor. Examples abound, but let me simply quote from the contents of a pair of books put out in the early nineties by an established publishing house in Beijing. One is a handbook for women, the other for men. The women's book discusses such topics as make-up, dieting, choosing an ‘ideal husband’, cooking, housework, decorating, contraception and leisure activities like flower arrangement and shopping. The men's book also covers questions of appearance, health and marriage, but in addition there are chapters on the ‘secret to success’, ‘how to handle defeat’ and how to deal with the world at large. In an age of uncertain masculinity, it would seem that only when the women are femmer than fem can the men feel like men.
If it's the case that, on some deeper level, the Chinese people in the age of reform ‘can't get no satisfaction’ no matter how they try, and they try, then they're obviously going to turn elsewhere for inspiration. Blake is but a fantasy from another world; he might as well be from another planet. In the search for Real Men role models, the Chinese once again have gone knocking at Mao's door.
Like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood in America and Winston Churchill in the UK, Mao set certain standards for Real Manhood that may well shadow the Chinese consciousness for generations.
Take the strange case of China's first rock star, Cui Jian. Rock stars are Real Men by definition—unless they're women of course, but let's not confuse the issue. Whereas Western rock stars may parade their masculinity in the form of intricate tattoos, heroic levels of drug and alcohol consumption and conspicuously young and pretty girlfriends, Cui Jian's trademark is an army uniform. Not just your average People's Liberation Army uniform, but one modelled after that of the Red Army of the Long March days, a style redolent of the time when real men were revolutionaries and Mao was the biggest revolutionary of them all.
In the late eighties and early nineties, China produced a spate of epic films on historical subjects. In the films, which had names like Decisive Battles, lots of men dressed like Cui Jian ran about plotting revolution, killing class enemies, resolving important conflicts, bonding with other men dressed like Cui Jian, and then taking over and ruling the country. Made as propaganda, they were genuinely popular. Gu Yue, the actor who plays Mao in many of them, couldn't appear in public without being mobbed by fans.
Out of the darkened theatres of revolution and blinking in the sunshine of reform, however, the viewer comes face to face with the gap between the Real Man past of dramatic action and the pussycat present of incremental change. In an age that may be best described by the Hungarian poet Miklos Haraszti's phrase ‘soft totalitarianism’, the closest the Chinese masses came to acting out their fantasies of hard revolution was in the protest movement of 1989. As the threat of violent suppression grew, the protesters increasingly adopted the language of revolutionary books and movies, and marchers raised Mao's portrait alongside their other banners. The female student leader Chai Ling adopted a rhetorical style reminiscent of those maler-than-male female Red Guards of the Cultrev, and took the militaristic title Commander-in-Chief of the Protect Tiananmen Headquarters.
In the end, of course, the romantic revolutionary symbolism invoked by the protesters proved no match for the party's heavy-metal socialist realism. Deng died without ever conceding that the massacre might have been unnecessary. Revolution, after all, means never having to say you're sorry.
I once read an article in the Beijing Evening News in which the male reporter, Liu Yida, bemoans the nuxinghua, or ‘feminisation’ of Chinese men. Liu locates the sources of the alleged problem in the schools, where female teachers far outnumber male. He quotes a male educator who says that in today's schools ‘the yin is ascendant and the yang on the decline’. The teacher tells Liu, ‘in our schools, some boys act just like girls. They are shy, they don't like to speak up, and they lack a feeling of yanggang zhi qi (a spirit of steely manhood)’. Liu calls on his readers to ‘take seriously and solve the trend of the feminisation of boys’. It is a question, he states, that ‘concerns the future of our nation and our people’.
I can't count the number of times I've heard male Chinese intellectuals whinge about the lack of yanggang zhi qi in China. But does China really need more Iron Zhangs?
Personally, I'd trade all the ‘he’ in China to be able to see its people enjoy a more rational, democratic system under which they'd be guaranteed basic human rights we in Australia take for granted. It may seem a minor point, but I fear that unless ordinary people and democracy activists and party leaders alike can stop worrying about the problem of whether they've got enough Real Men among them, there can be no meaningful change.
Leave the macho obsessions to rock. Cui Jian and the musical megadeth squads can act out everyone's Real Man fantasies: it's only rock n roll, after all. China doesn't need more Maos, or Dengs or Jiang Qings or even Chai Lings. It could use, on the other hand, a few more sensitive new age guys and gals who do sensitive new agey sorts of things like respect other people for what they are, listen calmly to the opinions of others and abandon the need to resolve every conflict with force. It could use a little less yang, a little more yin. Perhaps the unending search for Real Men could be replaced with a quest for simple humanity. That might be too much to ask, of course, but to quote the title of a song by Billy Bragg, ‘I'm Waiting for the Great Leap Forward’.
1 Zhang Xianliang, Seeds of Fire, G. Barmé and J. Minford, trans., NewYork, The Noonday Press, 1989, pp. 221–22.
I'm a Loser, Baby,
So Why Don't You Censor Me?
I was once visiting some friends in the unofficial artists' colony in Beijing outside the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace. A fellow in his twenties crossed the room to introduce himself to me. He said, rather grandly, ‘I am an underground poet.’
‘Oh really?’ I replied. ‘In what sense exactly do you mean “underground”?’
He seemed surprised at the question. This was clearly not the correct response.
I suggested a few possibilities. ‘Are you hiding out from anyone? Have you been banned from the official media?’
He looked at me as though I were a mentally challenged person. ‘I edit an unofficial poetry journal,’ he said. He happened to have a copy handy, and he pulled it out to show me. ‘See? It doesn't have an official publications registration number.’
‘Ah,’ I responded. ‘But did you ever actually try getting one for it?’
He moved to the other side of the room. Maybe it was my breath. Maybe it was my attitude.
Call me a cynic. Call me a ratbag. But I wasn't just taking the piss. I really am interested in the question of what it means to be an ‘underground’ artist of any sort—and even the whiffiest of poets are artists of sorts—in today's China. It's just that, to my mind, there's a difference between being in a subculture, like the one to which this poet irrefutably belonged, and being ‘underground’.
Subcultures are basement rooms with windows looking out on the pavement. They are alternative places to which an individual might choose to travel on his or her cultural journey, and stay a while, perhaps a lifetime. The underground, by contrast, is a tunnel with guarded entrances. You choose to move into a subculture; you are forced into the underground. You go underground if, for some reason of principle or style or the nature of your work, you are perceived as a threat by the powers that be, a threat which they are unlikely to tolerate. You go underground if you can't stay above ground, if it's too risky even to have that tiny little window open to the world. Underground can seem like a cool place to be if you're not actually
there. That's why subcultures like to strike underground poses. But, if you're really there, underground probably feels airless and claustrophobic.
In countries like Australia, there's no real artistic underground because there's no need for one. No one persecutes artists here—except, of course, art critics and gallery owners and postmodernist bores and landlords and parents who keep on asking, ‘So when are you going to get a real job?’
We can savour the romance of the concept of underground because it's just that, a concept. In China, things are a bit more complicated.
From the 1930s onwards, as part of their struggle for power, the Chinese Communists wrested areas of the countryside from government control and set up what they called ‘soviets’, self-governing bases for revolution. Wherever Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists were in control, the Communists had to carry out their activities underground. But where the Communists had managed to carve out spaces of their own, the Soviets, or ‘liberated areas’, they operated openly—though even ‘liberated areas’ were never entirely safe from attack.
In today's China, artists have created their own ‘liberated areas’. Unlike the historical liberated areas, these are not set up to challenge the authority of the government or establish bases for overthrowing it, but rather to move out of the line of direct fire, and away from immediate control.
These ‘liberated areas’ are essentially zones of the imagination, clear, sunny—if fortified—pastures of the mind. But they occasionally may have a kind of geographical reality as well. The Yuanmingyuan artists' colony where I encountered my ‘underground poet’ was in its heyday a perfect example of an artistic ‘liberated area’. The Yuanmingyuan is in what was once a predominantly rural area of suburban Beijing. The system of ‘household registration’ and surveillance by ‘neighbourhood committees’ that prevails in the city proper is less strict here. Beginning in the mid-eighties, artists have been renting homes and makeshift studios there without having to endure the bureaucratic red tape and prohibitive expense that this would require in the city itself. By the early nineties, the Yuanmingyuan had attracted so much attention, official and otherwise, that many of its original inhabitants moved on, some creating new artistic ‘soviets’ in villages further away from the capital.
