Bad Elements

Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing

Ian Buruma

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782398370
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Who speaks for China? Is it the old men of the politburo or activists like Wei Jingshsheng, who spent eighteen years in prison for writing a emocratic manifesto? Is China's future to be fund amid the boisterous sleaze of an electoral cmpaign in Taiwan, or in the manoeuvres by which ordinary residents of Beijing quietly resist the authority of the state?

These are among the questions that Ian Buruma poses in this enlightening and often moving tour of Chinese dissidence. Travelling through the U.S., Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People's Republic, Ian Buruma tells the stories of Chinese rebels who dare to stand up to their rulers, exploring their chances of success in the face of the most powerful dictatorship on earth. From the exiles of Tiananmen to the hidden Christians of rural China, he brings alive the human dimension to their struggles and reveals the world's most secretive superpower through the eyes of its dissidents.

Contents

Introduction

Introduction to the 2003 edition: Chinese Whispers

PART I: THE EXILES

Chapter 1: Exile from Tiananmen Square

Chapter 2: Waiting for the Messiah

Chapter 3: Stars of Arizona

Chapter 4: Mr. Wei Goes to Washington

Chapter 5: China in Cyberspace

PART II: GREATER CHINA

Chapter 1: Chinese Disneyland

Chapter 2: Not China

Chapter 3: The Last Colony

PART III: THE MOTHERLAND

Chapter 1: Frontier Zones

Chapter 2: Roads to Bethlehem

Chapter 3: The View from Lhasa

Chapter 4: A Deer Is a Deer

Acknowledgements

Glossary of Names

Notes

Index

Introduction

Much had changed in China when I wrote Bad Elements ten years after the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989. Even more has changed since then. New buildings, ever taller, ever bigger, have made cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing virtually unrecognizable to anyone who has been away for longer than six months. Old neighbourhoods – what is left of them – disappear overnight, to be replaced by more and more highrises, more shopping malls, more theme parks, sometimes replicating in miniature or in painted concrete ancient landmarks that have just been razed. This isn’t just a matter of economic growth, it is a transformation.

So was I wrong to detect a whiff of decay in the authoritarian one-party state when I travelled in the People’s Republic of China ten years ago? Was I misguided in my belief that the protesters, dissidents, and free spirited Chinese who often paid so dearly for their efforts to promote a political, as well as an economic, transformation mattered?

It is not hard to find many educated, prosperous, urbane citizens in the wealthier coastal regions who will say so. The foreign traveller in China today will often be told, sometimes in excellent English, that the country is not yet ready for the democratic freedoms my ‘bad elements’ demanded. China is too big, one hears, China is too large, Chinese history is too old, the Chinese masses are still too uneducated, in fact, China is just too damned complicated for democracy to take root. The whip-hand of authoritarian government is still essential to keep chaos at bay and create the necessary conditions for prosperity to grow. Democracy, so the argument goes, is a luxury, the icing on the cake, to be enjoyed once wealth and education is had by all; first food and shelter, then, possibly, freedom.

An alternative argument, which comes down to pretty much the same thing but has a more patriotic ring to it, is that China already has its own kind of democracy, a Chinese democracy in line with native traditions and history, a quasi-Confucian system where wise and benevolent rulers act, as it were by osmosis, according to the wishes of the people. And the people, instead of indulging in selfish demands for individual rights – which might suit Western culture, but is alien to the Chinese way – believe in sacrificing their private interests for the collective good, for the good of China, for the good of a great nation with five thousand years of history.

These arguments will be expressed, usually with great conviction, while one’s attention is drawn to those tall, glitzy buildings, and those shopping malls stuffed with all the luxuries of the modern world. Look at what China has achieved in twenty years! Don’t the figures speak for themselves?

So why should it matter what such voices in the wilderness as Wei Jingsheng, who spent fourteen years in prison before being sent into exile in the United States, still say about the lack of democracy in China? Or former student leaders of the Tiananmen demonstrations, some of whom now have successful business careers in the West, and some who still languish on the margins of exile publishing and academe. After all, their voices are no longer much heard in China. Chinese born just before and after 1989 have barely heard of the protests and the killings, let alone of people who played prominent roles back then. Parents won’t talk about it lest their children get into trouble. And the children have other things to worry about, like getting ahead in the exciting but sometimes brutal world of authoritarian capitalism.

Critics of the exiled dissidents like to point out that the former protesters are out of touch with developments in contemporary China. Since they no longer live there, and most are not even allowed to go back for family visits, memories are all they have left of the country they once sought, and sometimes still seek, to change.

It is true that China has moved on since Tiananmen. But this doesn’t mean that dissidents have disappeared. New people have emerged, lawyers who bravely take on sensitive cases of corruption, environmental damage, or workers’ rights. There is even some room on the Internet, or in scholarly journals, for serious discussions about democratic theory, as long as the supremacy of the Communist Party is not directly challenged. People talk of the need for more civic rights. Commercial newspapers report on scandals, news of which travels fast through cyberspace. In a one party state, such scandals can be the closest thing to political reporting, since crime and politics are sometimes close relations.

There is doubt that personal freedoms, in terms of sexual and romantic desires, private consumption, artistic expression, and religious practices, have been expanded in China. The deal made by the ruling party and the urban middle class is politically astute. Individuals are free to do or say a great deal more than they could in the past. They can own their own houses. Up to a point, they can choose their own jobs. But organized activity, by and large, is still subject to state control, even if such control is not always effectively enforced.

As long as the state guarantees order, a number of personal freedoms, and above all, the chance for the better educated to grow more and more prosperous, most people will not demand the rights taken for granted by any citizen of a liberal democracy. In short, for the sake of getting rich people have agreed to stay out of politics.

The majority of educated Chinese, precisely the sort of people who would have been protesting in Beijing and other cities all over China in 1989, accepted the deal. So it is hardly surprising that they are often the ones who will tell the enquiring foreigner that democracy doesn’t matter, or doesn’t fit the Chinese way. Worldly sophisticates are often the first to dismiss the importance of dissident voices, or people who still argue, at great risk to themselves, that China could be different, that political freedoms must match economic freedoms, and that a one-party dictatorship is unworthy of a civilized people.

Such voices are dismissed with particular contempt, when they come from abroad, from those exiled protesters who have grown ‘out of touch.’ And the foreigner who ventures to point out China’s political shortcomings, and lament the speed with which memories of Tiananmen have been swept under a nationwide rug, can often count on a blast of sometimes peevish nationalism: who is he to comment on Chinese affairs, of which the meddling foreigner is bound to be as ignorant as he is arrogant.

Such a reaction is not always without foundation. Many foreigners are indeed arrogant, as well as ignorant, and far too prone to adopt the preaching tone of the missionary in colonial times. Yet I suspect that the quick dismissal of political dissidence is not entirely divorced from a nagging sense of moral unease about having accepted a political deal that is perhaps opportune, but not entirely honorable. Many Chinese who have gone for the money after the tragic failures of 1989 cannot really have forgotten their earlier idealism. As is true everywhere, of course, idealism fades as people grow older and set in their ways. But the spirit of 1989, the desire for a freer, more open, less corrupt society, where citizens have rights, and don’t have to lie to stay out of trouble, is surely not dead. It could be revived very swiftly if circumstances change, as they surely will; no society, certainly not China, stays the same for ever.

In fact, as I write this introduction almost twenty years after Tiananmen, the circumstances are changing already, quite rapidly. China has not escaped from the credit crisis that is ravaging the world economy. The stock market has plunged. Newly unemployed workers are returning in huge numbers from the urban industrial zones and construction sites to their villages where they won’t find much work either. The poor, often cheated out of their wages by corrupt bosses, backed by local Party officials, are certainly not going to get richer soon. Their anger often explodes in riots. But these violent eruptions are local, and can still be contained with force.

But what about the middle-class pact? The consequences of that unravelling are perhaps far greater, for it is hard to see how the Communist Party can continue in power without the backing of the educated class. Even authoritarian governments need some sense of legitimacy to survive. Ideological legitimacy, already fading fast after the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, was lost in the crackdown on Tiananmen Square. The promise of order and high-speed economic growth was the only legitimacy the Party had left, as technocrats began to replace ideologues in the leadership. Now that this promise, too, is being lost, the middle-class may not stick to its part of the bargain. They might not agree to stay out of politics for much longer.

I am as loath to predict what might happen in the future as I was when I wrote my book in 1999, but one can imagine certain possibilities. One is a traditional Chinese pattern of local rulers replacing a crumbling central power. Provincial bosses, like the warlords of a hundred years ago, might take control of their regions. They are unlikely to be friends of democracy. Or extreme nationalism might be stirred up by an increasingly fearful government, keen to deflect the energy of middle-class resentment onto foreign targets. But this is a tactic full of risk. For this, too, could follow a traditional Chinese pattern, as radical nationalism is turned against the government itself, as a punishment for its weakness. Then again, the Chinese armed forces, anxious to restore order in the unruly empire, might step in and attempt to crush all dissent.

There is a more positive alternative, however, to these old routes to violence and oppression. It has been expressed with great eloquence in a remarkable document, first signed by more than three hundred Chinese citizens, ranging from law professors to businessmen, farmers, and even some Party officials. The three hundred odd names were soon joined by thousands more. Charter 08 appeared at the end of 2008, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was drawn up as a conscious echo of an earlier charter, written by Czechoslovakian dissidents in 1977, demanding human rights in a stagnant satellite of the Soviet empire. One of the spokesman was Vaclav Havel. He spent more than five years in prison as a result.

Charter 08 is not a radical document. There are no threats of violence, or vengeful sentiments. All the signatories demand is free elections, an independent judiciary, freedom of speech, and basic human rights. But of course, in a one-party dictatorship, these demands are radical. And so one of the ‘bad elements’ I wrote about twenty years ago, a quiet-spoken intellectual named Liu Xiaobo, was promptly arrested and jailed. Others, too, were rounded up, harrassed, and interrogated. One thing is clear: dissidents clearly do matter to the rulers of the People’s Republic of China.

They matter because they have refused to stick to the post-‘89 deal. They demand to be citizens in the true sense of the word. To be a citizen is to have a political voice. Several thousand unarmed people signing a charter obviously lack the force to topple the regime. For the government to be afraid of Liu Xiaobo, and his fellow democrats, as individuals, would be absurd. But their ideas are seen, quite correctly, as a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the one-party state.

To dismiss these ideas merely as ‘Western’ notions that have befuddled the minds of a few intellectuals would be a grave mistake, and an insult to the Chinese. There is no need for China to imitate the West, or mimic its models. All the signers of the Charter want is to follow the examples of South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan, all of which have functioning democracies. The Communist Party rulers might yet be able to block the route to political freedom, but after Charter 08 (or the republican revolution of 1911, or the May 4 Movement of 1919, or Tiananmen in 1989) it can never be denied that many Chinese ardently wish for it.

Considering the alternatives, all of which would mean more violence and oppression, this desire is not only justified, and worthy of a great civilization, but the recipe most likely to result in long-term social stability, which is in the interest of all of us, in ...